


hard to handle

by gsparkle



Series: i need a drink and a quick decision [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Private Investigators, Bisexual Steve Rogers, F/M, Hydra (Marvel), Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Missing Persons, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 02:17:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7556260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/pseuds/gsparkle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You work more than Romanoff and I put together. Every time I turn around, you’re closing a case and taking on two more, running all over the boroughs like you’ve got no other use for your time. I can’t remember the last time I saw you leave before me. So. As of this minute, you are relieved of your three open cases. You can take this one job with Rogers, or--” That knowing grin returned, pulling up a corner of his mouth. “Or you can take a month of vacation.”</p><p>For workaholic Maria Hill, locating Steve Rogers' ex-boyfriend Bucky is a punishment worthy of hell, especially when it turns out that the trail is six months cold and starts in Germany. She's tempted to immediately turn the whole mess over to the police, but it's too intriguing of a puzzle, she's got nothing else to do, anyway, and frankly, Steve isn't so bad to look at. Of course, the regret comes when the case veers off the beaten path and leads straight into New York City's underground network of gangs, extortion, an life-threatening danger. In the end, Maria fights not only for Bucky's life, but also for her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I said I was going to be done with this last December, which was obviously A Lie. Anyway, this is a follow up to the private eye story I wrote last year, but you shouldn't need to read that to understand anything that happens here! For no real reason, I've decided to make this universe Hall & Oates themed, so the title for this one comes from "You Make My Dreams Come True," which is an A+ song to make any day better.
> 
> santiagoinbflat, you are the best beta and an even better friend <3

“He’s such a sweet boy,” the old woman said pitifully, peering over her half-moon reading glasses. “Never did anyone harm in his life: he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

The human body had 206 bones: Maria figured at least  _ one _ of them had to be a little mean-spirited. Pointing this out to an septuagenarian shivering in the November wind brushing her doorstep, however, seemed fruitless. “I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,” she assured the woman. “I just want to find Jasper so we can figure out what actually happened.”

This was a lie, because this was not the first time Jasper Sitwell had been caught selling false documentation; and perhaps old Mrs. Sitwell could read this lie in the set of Maria’s brow, because the speculative light in her eyes flickered off. “Well I haven’t heard from him in--in a few months,” she said, eyes shunting right in an obvious lie. “He’s very busy--I mean, he’s  _ probably _ very busy with his new job.”

_ I bet he was here for dinner last night, _ Maria thought with a stifled sigh. She handed Mrs. Sitwell a business card, knowing that it would go directly into the trash. “Thanks for your time. If you see or hear from him,  _ please _ let me know.”

_ Another dead end. _ Maria stomped down the crumbling cement front steps and turned her face away from the wind as she trudged down the street.  _ I can’t believe I came all the fucking way down to Rockaway Park for this. _ She’d been on Sitwell’s tail for two days and had nothing to show for it. To make matters worse, she now had nearly an hour-long subway ride back up to Manhattan, followed by what would be a full day of aggravating phone calls and frustratingly vague clues as to the locations of her various bail-skipping prey. And to top it all off, a fine powdery snow began to drift from the sky as she entered the station.

It was, all in all, shaping up to be a shitty day for Maria Hill, and that prospect made it difficult for her to sink into the book she’d brought for her train ride back up to the city. She liked her job, and she was good at it: there was a certain satisfaction that was only achievable by solving puzzles, hunting down elusive people and bringing them to face the justice they tried to escape. The problem was that in between all of those interesting things were tedium, downtime, and paperwork, all of which ramped up in the winter while criminals generally were too cold to commit the kinds of crimes she chased down. It was November, with a low dreary sky that refused to show the sun, and the mere sense of the impending cold and snow was enough to make Maria scowl.

So the book didn’t get read, and when she finally shuffled her disgruntled way into the office of SHIELD Investigations, Clint Barton was lounging against the doorframe of Natasha’s office. And it wasn’t that she didn’t  _ like _ Clint, because he was so earnest in his care for her best friend that she’d have to be a fool not to see it; but now that Natasha had started seeing Clint, it was hard to feel like things hadn’t shifted, somehow. Maria and Natasha had always been an unflappable pair, preserving their friendship at an odd semi-distance because neither really knew what friendship was actually supposed to look like. It worked for them: they were each other’s only real friend. But now there was Clint, with his bright smile and clever charm and warm heart, and Maria was so bursting with pride that Natasha had found a way to trust someone else that there wasn’t possibly room for anything like jealousy.

Except that maybe there was, and she couldn’t quite put a finger on what exactly she was jealous  _ of _ . Having spent a good portion of her life alone, she’d never been particularly bothered when what few friends she had drifted away to partners and marriages and children. So maybe it was that Natasha was probably the best friend she’d ever had, a mirror to herself in more than a few ways, and the thought of losing her was more distressing than she’d like. And maybe, also, that she’d been holding off those thoughts of  _ wouldn’t you like to find someone to curl up with at night _ with a refrain of:  _ maybe, yeah, but at least in the meantime you have Natasha, and she’s alone too, so you can be alone together and that can be enough.  _

But now Natasha was smiling all the time and Clint was actually kind of funny and, though she’d never admit it, his sidekick Kate was growing on her; so Maria kept those pangs of jealousy tucked close to her chest, and merely waved hello to Clint before retreating into her office. The phone was already ringing and she snatched it up, one arm still trapped in her bomber jacket. “Hill, SHIELD Investi--”

“Come to my office. You have a new case.” The line cut off before she could respond, which was just as well, as it was probably bad form to growl obscenities at one’s boss. Granted, she’d known Nick Fury since she was 15, and he was more likely to cut out his good eye than fire her; furthermore, he’d taught her every foul word in her arsenal, so he wouldn’t exactly be surprised. Still, she figured it would have more effect in person, anyway, so she dutifully scooped up a steno pad and pen from her desk and trotted back past Clint into Fury’s office.

Maria threw the door open and announced, “Someone’s a crabby motherfucker--” Unfortunately, the delivery of this announcement was quickly axed when she realized that Fury was not alone. “Excuse me,” she said, glaring at her boss and she hurriedly slid into the empty seat across from his desk. “I thought you were alone.”

Fury smirked like the asshole he was. “That’s alright, Hill: Captain Rogers here is in the Army. He’s used to a little rough language.”

Maria grit her teeth and turned to offer her hand to the man who was apparently Captain Rogers. He had broad shoulders and gleaming blond hair, shorn close on the sides but longer on top in accordance with Army regulations. She could tell even sitting down that he was a tall man, and his eyes were a particularly bright blue. “Maria Hill,” she introduced herself. “Apologies for before.”

“Steve Rogers.” There was a trace of a Brooklyn accent in his round vowels, and his hand was warm as he shook hers. “And, like Nick said, no problem; just means I don’t have to watch my mouth.” He smirked conspiratorially, making his entire face light up, and Maria was momentarily taken aback by just how handsome this man was.

She did her best to bury that reaction, however, before Fury could see it; she seemed to have succeeded, as he launched into an explanation. “Captain Rogers is recently returned to the States, and he needs help finding an old friend. I told him you’d be happy to help.”

“Sir?” Maria looked from the captain’s hopeful expression to the grin on her mentor’s face, a lump of dread sinking in her stomach. “I--Captain, would you mind excusing us for a minute?” She sat on her hands until Steve Rogers had closed the frosted glass door behind him before turning on Fury. “Nick, what the fuck?”

The smile he gave her was frustratingly innocuous. “I’m sure I have no idea what you mean, Hill.”

“You’re such a shit,” she informed him, trying to keep a leash on her temper. “You know that I’m busy. You know I’m in the middle of three different investigations: Sitwell, and Rollins, and Pierce--”

Fury shrugged, wholly unconcerned. “So I’ll give those to Romanoff.”

“Bullshit,” Maria countered. “You know this isn’t Nat’s game.” Natasha’s past life as a grifter meant that she had a very specific skill set; she had been engineered since childhood to sneak and lie and acquire information in underhanded ways. She could become anyone in seconds, and could talk her way into or out of any situation. 

It was a life experience so wholly opposite of Maria’s that she couldn’t help but find it exotic sometimes, intriguing. She wasn’t so foolish as to believe that it had been fun, because the Red Room was a dangerous gang and she knew Natasha had suffered; all the same, the constricted life she’d led before leaving the police force and becoming an investigator had sometimes felt so suffocating that  _ anything _ had seemed like a better option.

She hauled her thoughts back to the present. “Nick, honestly, I’m not up for this. Why can’t you take the case?” Fury was extremely selective about the cases he took: normally, he took the high-profile cases to protect his employees from becoming recognizable; recently, however, he’d let Natasha take on a job with Stark Industries, one of the most prominent companies in the city. A worrying set of questions skittered across her mind:  _ Is he sick? Is he going to retire? _ “Are you feeling alright? Is something wrong?”

He at last dropped the maddeningly superior act and gave her half of a reassuring smile. “I’m fine, kid,” he promised with a wave of his hand. “Fit as a fiddle. In fact, I’m entering a squash tournament with Ray at our rec club next week. You should come.” Ray was Fury’s best friend since childhood, and he and Fury had been captains of neighboring Brooklyn precincts until the latter had retired to open this investigation agency. Evidently, this separation had not changed their apparent shared passion for European racquet sports.

“Pass,” Maria sighed. “So if you’re fine, then what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Nick announced victoriously, as if he’d been waiting for this moment the entire conversation (and, in all likelihood, he probably had been), “The problem is that  _ you’re _ not fine. Listen,” he added, because Maria had immediately sniffed in outrage, “Listen to me. You work more than Romanoff and I put together. Every time I turn around, you’re closing a case and taking on two more, running all over the boroughs like you’ve got no other use for your time. I can’t remember the last time I saw you heading to the bar with Romanoff and those two clowns that are always here these days.”

“I go out,” Maria huffed.  _ Sometimes. _ In her defense, going to the bar with Natasha these days also meant going with Clint and Kate, and when Kate talked her girlfriend into joining them, it was one big lovefest that Maria was distinctly not a part of. She was happy for them and all, but there were only so many times she wanted to see Kate’s tongue disappear into another person’s mouth. This, however, was not anything she wanted to discuss with Fury, so she moved on. “Plus, aren’t you the one who’s always encouraged me to work hard? Build my work ethic?”

Fury rolled his good eye. “That was when you were an aimless delinquent,” he told her, emphasizing each syllable. “May I remind you that you were 15?”

15, she remembered, headstrong and reckless and handcuffed in Fury’s office. She’d been caught jacking cars for the third time, and Nick had given her two options: serve her probation in his precinct and shape the fuck up, or be tried as an adult and drag her father’s name through the mud. And though nothing would have given her greater pleasure than seeing her father immersed in a scandal of her making, the kindness that lay under Fury’s sober gaze convinced her to give his probation offer a try.

“So I was,” she shrugged. “It was good advice then, and it’s good advice now. So I ask again: what’s the problem?”

“Maria,” Fury said, and he only ever said her first name in a gruff, kind voice that made her eyes prickle. “Look. You’re the daughter I never had, and I don’t want to watch you work yourself into the ground. There needs to be more to your life than this job, but you’re not going to find whatever that is if you keep working the way you do.” He cleared his throat a little and shifted in his chair, clearly just as uncomfortable as she was with emotions. “So. As of this minute, you are relieved of your three open cases. I’ll take care of Sitwell and Rollins and Pierce, and I’ll still give you your cut of the bounty. You can take this  _ one _ job with Rogers, or--” That knowing grin returned, pulling up a corner of his mouth. “Or you can take a month of vacation. The choice is yours, kid.”

Most people, she knew, would seize that vacation and run. Most people, though, had other things to do besides work. What would she do all day, exercise? Stare at the walls of her apartment? Watch TV, or--god forbid--take up  _ knitting? _ She looked into Fury’s uncompromising stare and sighed, defeated. “I’ll take the case.”

His smile was entirely too satisfied. “I thought you might,” he said, sitting upright in his chair to indicate this meeting was over. Maria stood, taking that as her cue to leave, and let the smallest smile twitch up the corners of her lips before turning to the door. “This’ll be good!” he called in parting. “You know I’m always right!”

She assumed that the finger she lifted in his direction as she left was enough of a response.


	2. Chapter 2

Captain Rogers was waiting right outside the door, dashing her half-formed plan to hide in her office for a minute. Beyond him, she could see Clint and Natasha holding an entirely contrived conversation in her doorway, clearly scoping out the situation. They both fell silent as Maria approached her newest (and now only) client.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked, turning and heading for her office before he’d accepted the offer. As soon as the captain was completely inside the room, she shot a glare across the office space to Natasha and Clint, each of whom grinned innocently as she firmly shut the door. 

“Friends of yours?” There was amusement in his eyes when she turned back to face him.

“Unfortunately,” Maria muttered before remembering her manners and gesturing towards the chair across from her desk. “If you want to take a seat, I’ll get the coffee going.” 

This was, of course, an excuse for her to shamelessly observe him while she measured grounds and poured water. Captain Steve Rogers  _ was _ tall, as she’d suspected, standing at least four inches taller than her. He’d removed his coat, leaving him in a military issue wool sweater that did nothing to hide a muscular and powerful build, which reminded her that it had been a  _ really _ long time since she’d been on a date. She pushed that thought aside and refocused as the aroma of brewing coffee began to fill the air. Fury had said Rogers had just returned to the country, and she wondered how recently that really meant. He still held himself as if he were on duty, falling into parade rest and keeping his spine ramrod straight. Taking it all in, the posture and the stature and the all-American energy he positively filled the room with, Maria was certain that Fury had just saddled her with one of those Boy Scout types she’d spend half her life avoiding.

_ No use worrying about it now, _ she told herself as the coffee finished percolating and she poured it into two old NYPD mugs. This was her case now, and that was that; so she drew a steadying breath, placed one mug in front of the captain, and slid into her desk chair. He offered her a smile of thanks and they were silent for a moment as they each sipped their coffee. She was sorting through her standard array of questions, trying to decide which to ask first, when he spoke. 

“I’m sorry Nick sprung that on you,” he said, the apology reflected in his eyes. “We were halfway through catching up when all of a sudden he just picked up the phone and--well, you know.”

Maria waved the apology away and rolled her eyes. “That’s just his way,” she said, allowing her voice to go fond as she remembered how he’d done the same thing when he’d prepared to leave the police force.  _ Come to my office, lieutenant, I have a job for you. _ No frills, no fanfare: that was the Nick Fury way of life. “How do you know Nick? You two seemed familiar.”

He had, she suddenly noticed, a sort of sadness to his smile, a droop in his eyes even as his lips pulled up. “When I was young, his mother lived next door to us. He’d visit her at least once a week, and he’d always stop and chat with my mom, too; she was a single mother and he’d help her lift stuff, put up shelves, whatever.” His voice roughened. “My mom died, though, and Nick and I lost touch when I went into the system. I didn’t try very hard to keep in contact.” He stared into his coffee for a minute, seeing something far past its swirling contents, then looked back up, clearly embarrassed. “Sorry. Anyway. The case.”

“The case,” Maria repeated, because she had no idea what else to say. She never knew what to say when people got emotional, shed tears or confessed sins or wrung their hands in distress. Natasha swore that it was easy, that all it took was a gentle word and a kind touch; but Maria’s first instinct was always to retreat, to bury herself in order and protocol and work until all the emotions had shriveled up and crawled away. “Yes. The case.” She gathered herself and met his gaze. “How can I help you, Captain?”

“Please, Ms. Hill, it’s just Steve.” That sad smile was back on his face. “I didn’t get a chance to mention this to Nick, but I was actually discharged just over 48 hours ago, so I’m technically not a captain anymore, anyway.”

He clearly wasn’t happy about that, but she figured he’d get around to that part eventually.  _ “Ms. Hill _ makes me feel old,” she offered instead. “You can just call me Maria, or Hill if you prefer.”

“Okay,” he said, with maybe the first real smile she’d seen on his face. “Maria. I can do that.”

When he smiled,  _ really _ smiled, he was heart-stoppingly handsome.  _ Not relevant, _ she told herself as she flipped open her notebook.  _ Don’t even go there. _ Aloud, she asked, “So Nick says you’re looking for a friend. What’s his name?”

“Bucky,” Steve said promptly, then paused. “Well, James. James Buchanan Barnes, but everyone calls him Bucky.” He reeled off a brief description: similar height, brown hair and grey eyes, and a mechanically stylized tattoo extending the length of his left arm.

“Last seen?” Maria asked without looking up from her hastily scribbled notes, but her head tipped up when Steve hesitated.

“Stuttgart, Germany,” he said, almost apologetically. “Six months ago.”

“Six  _ months?” _ She’d worked cases that were six hours cold: they were tough enough. Missing persons cases that were six days out were practically unheard of. Six months out was… 

“I know it sounds impossible,” Steve said. He couldn’t seem to decide if he was coaxing or pleading. “I know it’s crazy. Please just hear me out?”

Maria bit her lip. On the one hand, there was no way she was going to work this case. She was good at her job, sure, but she wasn’t a miracle worker. The right thing to do was to send him off to the police station, take Fury’s mandated vacation, and wash her hands of this whole mess. But on the other hand was the nagging voice in her head that reminded her:  _ Fury will be disappointed. _ If it were just that Fury would be mad, well: his name  _ was _ Fury, and he was mad about 20 hours a day. It wasn’t often that he was disappointed, though, and she’d long ago committed herself to the goal of never disappointing him. So she swallowed the refusal that first rose to her tongue and instead settled back in her chair. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“When I was eight,” he said, eyes drifting to a scene in the past that Maria couldn’t see, “When I was eight, my mom died. I went into the system, and I ended up going to a new school. I show up the first day and it turns out I’m literally the smallest kid in the building. I got into a fight, and by recess I had a split lip, a bloody nose, and no money for lunch. I was sitting under the jungle gym, definitely not in any way crying, when suddenly there’s a sandwich in my face. I look up and he’s just---just  _ sitting _ there, casually offering to share his lunch like I wasn’t, you know, a mess. I guess maybe it’s easier when you’re kids, or… I don’t know. That’s just how he is.

“We were inseparable after that. The kids figured out that they’d have to go through him to get to me, so they left us alone. Without Bucky, I… I don’t know. I might not have made it. Sorry, I know that’s really dramatic, but he was all I had. By high school, god, we were so in love; you know how teenagers fall so entirely for each other. You think you’re going to be together forever, that nothing’s ever going to change. Idiots, that’s what we were.

“We went to school on ROTC scholarships. In high school, we got plenty of shit for being together, but Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell meant that we could lose our grants. I wanted to fight the system, but he said we needed to keep our heads down. We fought a lot, about that and the future and everything else, until all we were doing was fighting. So we broke up, and it was terrible for a month until we figured out how to be friends again.

“I’m sorry, I’ve always been terrible at telling stories. I promise I’m almost done. I got my degree in art, Bucky in engineering, and after graduation, our unit got sent off to Stuttgart. That was situation normal until about six months ago. I had just been made a captain, and our group of friends had gone up into the mountains for a camping weekend. Bucky said he had an engineering deadline, so he stayed behind. It would have been a great weekend, but on the way back, I fell down a ravine and got stuck for a day or so until they could figure out how to get me out. 

“The whole situation was a charlie foxtrot, and I ended up in medical getting treated for hypothermia. It was only then that we realized Bucky was missing. His entire quarters were cleared out, and the only clue we could find as to his whereabouts was a postcard from Brooklyn that we found stuffed under his mattress. I had my bags half-packed before my commanding officer told me I couldn’t go after him. I resigned on the spot, but I was trapped on the base for six months until my discharge request went through. I’m pretty sure they drew the process out, trying to get me to stay; it didn’t work. I got on literally the first flight out of Stuttgart I could find, and I came here straight from the airport.”

He unfolded his coat and retrieved a postcard of the Brooklyn bridge, creased in one corner where it’d been squashed against his chest. Maria could see the faint whorls of fingerprints on the glossy side of the cardstock; he’d clearly turned it over and over in his hands, perhaps poring over it at any unoccupied moment, looking for a clue he’d missed. She held the postcard gingerly and peered at the writing scrawled across the back in splotchy blue ink:

 

_ Bucky,  _

_ F and G wish you’d come visit--they miss you. When you can get the time off, come see us at their place. Don’t worry, I’ve been taking good care of them, but I could use some help. _

 

The handwriting was a uniform genderless script; there was no signature. Maria held the card for a moment, reading the brief missive again. She couldn’t help but feel that there was something more to the message, something that was hiding under the surface. The absence of a name, or any specific details, made her itch with questions.

“This is postmarked April 30th,” Maria said at last, handing the card back to Steve. “What part of your story correlates to that date?”

Steve seemed to be expecting this question. “It takes about a week for mail to get from the US to Germany,” he explained. “I checked. Considering that, this would have arrived around May 7th… which just so happens to be the Thursday of my weekend camping trip.”

Maria looked at the man across her desk with something akin to resignation. “He didn’t have an engineering deadline,” she said slowly.

“No,” Steve Rogers said with an equally slow shake of his head, “He didn’t.”

The problem was that Maria had always loved puzzles; the more intricate, the better. The problem was that the first ten minutes of this case already excited her than anything she’d worked on in the last six months. The problem was that Steve Rogers’ imploring blue gaze was entirely impossible to say no to.  _ God damn it. _

“Okay, Mr. Rogers,” she said with a sigh. “You’ve got yourself a private investigator.”


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Maria got down to business.  _ If I knock this one out of the park, _ she thought as she unlocked the SHIELD office in the November sunrise,  _ Nick will have no choice but to bring me back on full time. _ In her heart of hearts, she fully recognized this as wishful thinking: Nick Fury wouldn’t reinstate her until he damn well felt like it. Still, a little motivation never hurt anyone, and the prospect of getting back up to her full case load put a spring in her step as she put coffee on to brew and began assembling her case notes.

She had just labelled a new folder in her precise script when Natasha materialized in her office doorway. Though the redhead usually grumbled a morning greeting before pouring her coffee and leaving, today she surprised Maria by settling in to the chair across her desk and sipping her coffee for a moment before saying, “So, are you going to tell me what’s up, or am I going to have to guess?”

Natasha had been gone by the time Maria’s entrance interview with Steve Rogers finally wrapped up, and Maria had taken this to mean that Natasha wasn’t curious about the case. Evidently, she’d been wrong. “One day I  _ will _ make you guess,” she half-heartedly threatened before leaning back in her chair and laying a hand over her eyes. “Fury thinks I work too much. He took away all my open cases and gave me the option of either this single missing person case, or else taking a month of vacation. I took the case.”

“Of course you did,” Natasha said, as if this was the most obvious answer; and though it had been a quick decision, Maria was curious about why it was obvious to Natasha, and why she could hear a smile in her friend’s voice.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, finally peering out from behind her fingers.

Natasha’s face wasn’t as teasing as she’d expected. “It means that guy looks like a walking Renaissance sculpture. I mean, I know we’re not really supposed to hook up with clients, but you could make an exception.  _ I’d _ make an exception.”

“You already have a boyfriend,” Maria pointed out. “And even if I was to ask him out--which I  _ wouldn’t, _ because it’s a  _ terrible idea _ \--I’m pretty sure he’d say no. I’m helping him find his  _ ex-boyfriend _ , you know.”

Natasha shrugged, unconcerned. “So? Maybe he’s bi, or something. You could ask.”

There were few things Maria was less likely to do. “Sure,” she snorted, “I’ll go do that right now.” She raised her eyebrows and pointedly returned to the process of assembling her case file.

Despite the fact that she was ignoring Natasha, she could still clearly see the redhead roll her eyes. “Fine,” Natasha said, levering herself from her seat, “Ignore me. But--hey, Maria?” Maria looked up at the change in her voice, suddenly pitched unusually shy. “I’m glad you’re taking a break, is all. I know I’ve been kinda caught up with Clint lately, but I hope we can get together more while you’re on your not-vacation.” She offered Maria the same small but genuine smile that had first convinced her that the Red Room’s Black Widow could be more than just a master con artist. It was gone in a second, replaced by a shrug. “Okay, I’m going to go work now, before this starts getting all touchy-feely. And we’re getting drinks tonight, don’t punk out.”

“I’ll be there,” Maria promised as Natasha retreated, and she received an over the shoulder wave in response. Alone again, she turned her focus back to the case. Steve had given her a little bit of background about his friend, notably the suspicion that Bucky still had an apartment leased somewhere in Brooklyn. It seemed odd that he’d maintain a residence while overseas; it certainly wasn’t normal in the Army, at least, and that was enough of a reason to plug  _ James Buchanan Barnes _ into an address database and comb through the various results they spat out. “James Buchanan Barnes” turned out to be a more common name than she’d expected, but by midmorning Maria had narrowed her list down to a few addresses clustered around northwest Brooklyn. The sun was winning its battle with the winter clouds and Maria had the happy realization that, without three other cases vying for her time, she could walk right out and hop on the next train to High Street.

The first James Buchanan Barnes lived in DUMBO, one of neighborhoods Steve had mentioned by name; unfortunately, he was also an elderly black man who was much more interested in setting Maria up with his grandson, who attended college in Colorado. “Tempting,” she lied before moving back down the street. The second James Buchanan Barnes, she learned from a frazzled Cobble Hill housewife, was a third grader at PS 29 down the street. By the time she left the house of James Buchanan Barnes number five, who had actually died three months prior, Maria was starting to regret that she hadn’t cross-checked her addresses with any other database. She’d let herself get caught up in her newly open schedule and the balmy November day, and the result was subpar detective work. She could hear her father’s voice so clearly that he might as well have been standing next to her on the sidewalk:  _ That was terribly done, Maria. Will there ever be a day that you don’t disappoint me? _

The answer to that was probably  _ no,  _ and she’d accepted that pretty early in life. Remembering this, however, didn’t exactly improve her soured mood, and nor did the discovery that the last address on her list was on the top floor of a five floor walk-up in Red Hook. Her annoyance mounted at each landing, and by the time she reached 5C and realized that the door was slightly ajar, she had half a mind to just go home and call it a day.

The other half of her mind still thought like a cop, though, and those instincts immediately put her on alert. She quieted her steps and moved carefully down the hallway. As she drew closer, it became plain that there was someone inside the apartment: there was the unmistakeable sound of shuffling papers, the soft screech of shifting furniture, the impatient tap of a man’s heavy foot.  _ Bucky Barnes, or someone else who’s looking for him?  _ Reaching the door, Maria eased it open as gently as she could, placing each foot with deliberation. There was a worn rug on the floor that muffled her footsteps, and since she was still unnoticed by the man in what she assumed was the bedroom, she took a moment to scan her surroundings.

It was a small apartment, roughly square and divided in half by an exposed brick wall. There were scuffed hardwood floors that stretched across the one long room functioning as both living area and kitchen. Furnishings were minimal: a lumpy couch faced an empty entertainment console in the living area, while two folding chairs and a small table hung on the wall next to the creaking refrigerator. There was a door open to a miniscule bathroom, and a closed door behind which her mystery man still searched for something.

The entire place seemed neat and free of dust, and yet there was still a distinct scent of neglect in the air. The mail, for example, had been piling up, and Maria passed a hand through the envelopes, more focused on her unwitting companion. Her eyes slid over the address lines:  _ James Buchanan Barnes, James Barnes, Mr. James B. Barnes, Bucky Barnes, James--wait. _ She snatched up one of the envelopes and looked at it again. The letter was addressed in a spiky hand, and while it wasn’t the same script of the postcard, excitement still twanged through her system. Every person she’d spoken to that morning had wrinkled their brow at the name “Bucky Barnes,” denying ever hearing that name and, in one case, asserting that it was a stupid nickname, anyway. This was her first real connection to her missing man, and the success emboldened her. 

Easing a butter knife from a drawer and sliding it into her back pocket just in case, Maria stepped quietly to the bedroom door, drew a breath, and flung the door open. “Mr. Barnes?” The man who turned away from the corner bookshelf, however, wasn’t dark haired; he was blonde, tall, and had the good grace to look embarrassed.  _ “Steve?” _

“Ms. Hill,” he said, abruptly dropping the sheaf of papers in his hands. “Um. Fancy meeting you here?”

There was no more adrenaline, only annoyance and anger and fury. If she were alone, Maria might have launched into a private tantrum, kicked a door and cursed the air blue. But she was a professional, and she wasn’t alone, so she did what she always did: she froze, tamped down on her rising blood pressure, and waited.

Guilt painted bright red circles on his cheeks. “I know this looks really bad, I just--I wasn’t sure if this was even the right place, and I thought I’d come and see if there was even anything here worth investigating. It looks like he hasn’t even been here, so I thought I’d be saving you some time; but I guess now I’ve just wasted your time instead.” He lifted a hand in a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry. I was trying to help.”

“Well, you didn’t. Now I’ve wasted my morning hauling ass around Brooklyn instead of just starting my investigation here in the first place. My job is not a game, okay, and if you want me to find your friend then you need to never do shit like this again. It’s patronizing as hell and I don’t need your help.” 

_ Fuck. _ This was the reason Maria had trained herself to shut down when angry, to let a blanket of frost settle across her shoulders. It was alway better to keep her mouth shut and walk away, because if she didn’t, her anger said the wrong thing, something hurtful or inflammatory or callous, and she ended up looking like an asshole. Normally, she had a better hold on her temper, but the morning had made her cranky, and finding out that it was all a waste of time pissed her off, so her mouth had opened of its own accord.  _ Now you’re the one who has to apologize.  _ “Excuse me, that was rude--”

“No it wasn’t.” Steve was shaking his head. “You’re completely right: this was a dick move. I just--” He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sighed. “I haven’t heard from him in so long, you know? I’m worried; and I know that’s not an excuse, but--” The papers he was holding crumpled a little in his big hands. “I’ve never been very good at waiting for answers.”

His voice was quiet and there was something lost in his eyes, and even though Steve Rogers had been nothing but a pain in the ass since she’d met him, Maria felt for him. “I understand,” she told him, letting her voice soften as well, “But, look, this is my job, and I’m  _ good _ at it. I can find Bucky faster if you just let me work.” Her eyes roved over the bare walls and empty closet of the bedroom, snagging on the empty brass bed frame. “For example: you think nobody’s been here, but if that were true, this bed--and the whole place, for that matter--would be an inch thick in dust. And the postmarks on the mail only go back about a month, which means that someone comes and collects it.”

“Becca,” Steve said immediately. He was looking at her meaningfully, as if this were a name she should remember, and while it was vaguely familiar, Maria couldn’t place it. She sent him a slight frown instead of answering. “Becca,” he repeated, “You know, his sister. I told you about her. She’s--” He broke off to cock his head towards the door, then turned back with an expression that could only be described as urgent. “I think she’s  _ here. _ ”

“Here?” Maria all but squeaked. “Now?” Maria had stared down more gun barrels than she could count, had chased bail jumpers across rooftops and tackled armed men to the ground; but she was a terrible, awful, horrendous liar, especially when put on the spot. Natasha had tried to train her, and she could carry a story along if she had enough time to prepare, but the forthcoming situation promised to be a disaster of grand proportions.

Unfortunately, Steve seemed to be having the same issue. His mouth moved wordlessly, as if the motion alone might force a plan to emerge; but none did, so they stood staring at each other like trapped protagonists in the world’s stupidest horror movie, waiting for the cautious footsteps in the other room to approach. A wary voice curved around the doorframe. “Bucky? Is that you?” 

Steve cleared his throat. “Uh,” he said, “No. It’s me, Steve.” The shrug he sent to Maria said,  _ well, what else am I supposed to say? _ She didn’t have a response, which was just as well, as a young woman stepped into the bedroom. Maria instead took stock of the girl’s short cropped coppery hair and suspicious hazel eyes. She wore ripped jeans tucked into black scuffed boots, a too-big khaki military jacket, and a Brooklyn College t-shirt so worn it was almost translucent. Considering the youthful roundness to her cheeks, this girl couldn’t have been more than 20.

The defensive set to her shoulders vanished as she recognized Steve. With a small burst of laughter, she stepped forward to throw her arms around the former soldier and said, “It’s so great to see you home!” A more playful suspicion came into her eyes as she looked around the room. “Where’s Bucky? If he’s planning to jump out and scare me, it won’t work. I’m not five anymore. And who’s this?”

The panic in Steve’s eyes suggested that he hadn’t gotten to that part of the plan yet. Just as Maria was about to pull out her business card, he blurted, “My, uh, girlfriend; but, Becca, listen--”

“Oh!” Becca interrupted, popping up from where she’d been checking under the bed. “Of course! You must be the Peggy that Bucky wrote about. It’s so great to finally meet you!”

Now that was an interesting development for a variety of reasons. Aside from the ill-fated possibility that she’d soon be acting the part of this unknown woman, there was also the fact that she seemingly could have a chance with Steve Rogers after all.  _ A chance you’d never take, _ Maria quickly reminded herself, because even if he  _ would  _ be interested, there were somes rules that she knew better than to break. Still, she wasn’t made of stone, so Maria pinned Steve with a gaze equally as intrigued as Becca’s.

“Er,” he said, “No. We broke up while ago.” The words were simple and without animosity, but Maria could see the corners of his sad smile lifting. “Anyway. This is Maria, my, uh, new girlfriend. Look, Becca, we’re actually here because we’re looking for Bucky. Have you seen him?”

For the first time, doubt made its way across the girl’s features. “I thought--since you’re here, I thought he’d be here with you,” she said, voice faltering as she looked around the room. “You guys never go anywhere without each other.”

Steve’s voice was kindly apologetic, as if any of this was his fault. “I haven’t seen Bucky in six months,” he confessed, “And I’m worried that something’s happened. Have you heard from him?”

Becca’s chin started to tremble, but she pressed her lips together for a moment before speaking. “I don’t… I can’t remember the last time I heard from him,” she said with a catch in her voice. “I’ve been collecting his mail while he’s been away and usually he checks in with me every so often to see if anything important has come in. I--I thought he’s just been too busy.”

Her chin was wobbling again, and Maria hastily handed her the beaten postcard as a temporary distraction. “Do you recognize this handwriting?” she asked, taking care to keep her voice gentle: an investigator might interrogate, but “Steve’s girlfriend” wouldn’t be so pushy. “We think he got this just before he disappeared.”

Curiosity warred with distress on Becca’s face as she turned the card over and over, tracing the outline of the cardstock as she read the message. At last she handed it back to Maria. “I’m sorry,” she said to Steve, a few tears leaking out of her desolate eyes. “I can’t help you.”

He gave her a reassuring smile and set one big hand on her shoulder. “That’s okay,” he told her, “It was worth a shot.” He waited until her lips turned up in a reluctant watery smile before adding, “Sorry we broke in. I’ll pay to get the lock replaced. And I hired a private investigator; Bucky will be back in no time.” 

Maria was begrudgingly impressed that he managed to say that last part without once looking in her direction. She wasn’t going to say so, though, not even once Becca had hugged Steve tightly before showing them back out to the street. “That was almost a disaster,” she informed him once they were alone on the sidewalk. “A disaster! Do you know how dangerous it is to conduct investigations without any kind of training? Not to mention illegal; I mean, Jesus, Steve, you could have been arrested for trespassing, and even  _ I _ wouldn’t be able to talk you out of that one--” She froze and looked at Steve, waiting to see if he realized that she’d said too much; but his eyes remained trained on a crack in the sidewalk, so with a sigh she stepped closer and laid a hand on his elbow. “I don’t know how I would have talked myself out of that if you weren’t there. I don’t need a sidekick, and I’m not saying that this will be a regular occurrence, but you were actually not a total catastrophe in there, so good job, I guess.”

Though his smile was wry, there was relief in his eyes: clearly, he had thought this incident was going to end in his contract being terminated. Realistically, she probably  _ should _ have ended the investigation, but she liked a good challenge, and she’d never been able to turn down clients who wore desperation like a jacket. “I get the impression that that’s high praise, coming from you,” he said, quickly raising his hands and adding, “But I get the message, loud and clear. I’m sorry for stepping on your toes and causing trouble and being--”

“A pain in the ass?” Maria innocently suggested as she turned and headed down the street.

Steve winced and fell into step behind her. “Yeah… I get that a lot.”

 

“I’ll just bet he does,” Natasha agreed later as Maria replayed the day’s events over beer at The Mermaid Grotto, their favorite bar. It got dark early now that Daylight Savings Time was over, and they’d come to a mutual agreement at 4:00 to fuck it all and head for the Grotto for a greasy plate of nachos to celebrate her new client. It was a time-honored ritual that Maria was glad hadn’t petered out, and now they were on their second tray of nachos and their fourth respective pints.

“I mean,” Maria started, peeling a jalapeno off her nacho and sticking it on Natasha’s, “He’s cute; like, really cute. But what the fuck?”

Natasha nodded as if this had been a cohesive and thought-provoking point. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she suggested, sprinkling hot sauce over her half of the plate. “He just moved back from Germany, right? Maybe he doesn’t know anyone else to hang out with.”

Maria snorted. “If that’s true, it’s pathetic. I’m a fucking detective, not some kind of friend for hire. I’d be terrible at that shit.”

“I think you’re a good friend,” Natasha said loyally around a mouthful of chips. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. If he wants to be your friend, then he’s at least got good taste.” 

She was just tipsy enough to be telling the truth, and Maria had to wrinkle her nose to stop herself from returning the sentiment. “That’s pretty cheesy,” she said instead, smiling just enough so that Natasha would know she teasing.

“Blame it on the nachos,” the redhead replied with a grin before flagging down the bartender for another beer. Pint glass filled again, she turned back to Maria with a smirk. “But seriously, maybe he likes you. He  _ did _ call you his girlfriend, after all. Are you going to let him help out on the case?”

“No!” Maria responded, probably more emphatically than necessary, and she wasn’t sure which part of Natasha’s suggestion she was resisting more. Deciding to blame it on the alcohol rather than pick apart her feelings, she enumerated the various problems with her friend’s statement, counting them out on her fingers. “First of all, you know that girlfriend is the easiest cover. Secondly, he apparently just broke up with someone, so he’s probably a mess. In fact, he clearly  _ is _ a mess, considering how today went. He kept information from me, he then  _ compromised _ that information by getting there first and going through it, he set me up in this stupid lie with this guy’s sister, he thinks that private investigation is a  _ joke, _ and--and--” She’d run out of things to count, so picked up her beer and gulped from it instead. “Oh, I don’t  _ know.  _ I’m going to try and run down some flight manifests tomorrow and see where that takes me. I’ll figure out what to do about Steve later. Let’s just talk about your problems instead.”

Natasha’s mouth was still curled in an infuriatingly superior smirk that was annoyingly akin to the one Fury had given her the day prior. “Sure,” she said in her magnanimous tone of voice that usually meant that she knew something Maria didn’t. “Whatever you want.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Maria sighed indifferently as she waved the bartender over. “Tell me about your zoo case before I dump this on your head.”

Natasha tapped her glass against Maria’s with a grin. “You wouldn’t,” she said, “You’re not one to waste good beer.” 

“I wouldn’t,” Maria agreed, but it didn’t have anything to do with the beer at all.


	4. Chapter 4

International flight manifests turned out to be a real hassle to track down. Maria spent half her day arguing credentials with various immovable Stuttgart officials and then, after finally persuading someone to cooperate, spent the second half of the day waiting for her requested paperwork to arrive. As of 5 pm, she had a throbbing headache and no flight manifests, leading her to call the entire day a wash and sulk home to turn in early after a long hot bath.

Today, though, was Thursday, and that long hot bath, paired with those extra hours of sleep, had combined to thoroughly improve her mood. Optimism was rarely her outlook, but Maria swam in it, convinced that she’d arrive at the office to find that Natasha had shown up early, put the coffee on to brew, and would be waiting at the door with the flight manifests in hand.

The first part was, of course, wishful thinking, as the day Natasha Romanoff was early to work was the day snow fell in hell; but the flight manifests  _ had _ arrived, and that was more than enough to keep Maria’s optimism rolling along. She made her morning coffee with one hand, the other busy flipping through her stack of documents still hot off the printer. Distracted, she drank her coffee too soon and was in the midst of swearing profusely when Nick Fury stuck his head in her door. “My office, Hill.” 

Maria whipped around and found him smirking at her. “But, Sir, I was just about to--”

“Now.” He crossed over to Natasha’s office, apparently delivering the same message. Maria looked longingly at her files before shutting her office door. She wanted to  _ work, _ damn it, and now that she finally had something to  _ do-- _

“What’s up his ass this time?” Natasha murmured as they walked together down the hall.

“Fuck if I know,” Maria grumbled, filing into the office and slumping into one of the seats. 

“What’s  _ up my ass,” _ Fury announced, biting off each irritated syllable, “is this.” He tossed a crisp parchment envelope onto the smooth mahogany surface of his desk. “Go ahead, Romanoff, open it. This is all your fault, anyway.”

Quizzical, Natasha picked up the envelope and carefully pulled out a thick rectangle of 100lb paper. “‘The Guggenheim Foundation requests the company of Nicholas Fury, Maria Hill, Natasha Romanoff, and their guests at the Gala for the Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Saturday, November 28, at 7 pm.’ White tie, RSVP, blah blah blah.” Her eyes flashed with excitement as she looked up. “Are you  _ serious? _ We get to go to the Guggenheim Gala? How? And I can bring a date? Can I--”

_ “How?” _ Fury interrupted, brow scrunching towards his nose in a scowl, “Your new friend Pepper Potts is how! I knew I should’ve taken that job; then we wouldn’t be invited to stupid shit like this. Now I have to go rent a tux and spend the night shaking sweaty hands and eating shrimp puffs.  _ Shrimp puffs! _ ”

Natasha bristled. “Galas are not stupid,” she sniffed. “You are.”

“You could just not go,” Maria said at the same time, pointing out what she felt was a very obvious solution. “Or take Ray, I guess.”

Fury’s scowl only deepened. “Like I hadn’t thought of that. Ray is busy and I can’t just  _ not go _ . It would look bad if we only sent our most junior member, no offense, Red.”

Waving that away, Natasha asked instead, “Hold on. Who said I’d be the only one of us going? Maria’s coming. Aren’t you?”

“No,” Maria said quickly, casting about for a suitable lie. “I’m busy. Very busy. Zumba class.” Not that she had much opportunity to attend them anyway, but Maria avoided any and all major galas, banquets, and philanthropic events in the city like the plague itself. She wasn’t a particularly big fan of ballgowns, but what she really hated was the even slight possibility of running into her father. As a prominent figure in New York City politics, Richard Hill was almost always invited to those sorts of things, and Maria would rather take fifty Zumba classes than run into him in public.

Fury knew all this, but that didn’t seem to matter, because he was grinning at her like a cartoon cat; Maria could practically see the canary feathers in his teeth. “Romanoff, what an  _ excellent _ idea. Hill, come up with a better excuse next time: the day you take a Zumba class is the day I get elected pope. You’re both going so that I don’t have to. Dismissed,” he added over Maria’s sputtered objections. He continued to grin triumphantly in the face of her arguments until she finally gave up and stomped out. 

“Zumba really was a terrible excuse.” Natasha was waiting for her, offering no sympathy whatsoever. She bounced on her toes after Maria, who opted to ignore this line of conversation in favor of returning to work and pretending that she hadn’t just been conscripted into a night of horror. “Even  _ Clint _ knows that you’d never take a Zumba class. When do you want to go dress shopping? I bet Nick will pay for everything if you whine enough.”

“Probably,” Maria finally sighed in response, settling into her chair and picking up her flight manifests. Maybe she’d get caught up in a lead on Bucky, so caught up that she’d have to skip out on the gala. Maybe he’d be involved in something nefarious, and she’d get  _ kidnapped _ , and then she’d have a perfectly good excuse to not show up. The thought cheered her and she perked up a little, shuffling her papers for a minute with a little more enthusiasm.

Somehow, though, Natasha hadn’t gotten the hint that she was working, and had now found her way to the topic of their plans for Thanksgiving, which they’d had together since she’d joined the office. Maria tuned back in to hear, “It’s your turn to host this year, right? Yeah, since last year is when we nearly burned my curtains down. Okay, so since your place is so much bigger than mine, do you want to invite anyone else this year?”

Natasha was in many ways an enigma, even this far into their friendship, but Maria spoke her language enough to understand that what she meant was “Can I bring Clint or will that be weird?” Her gut reaction was that yes, it would be terribly weird, because Thanksgiving was  _ their _ thing: they snarked through the parade, sighed through the dog show, and ate half the mashed potatoes by the time dinner was on the table. She liked it that way. But of course she couldn’t say that, because Natasha was tracing a continuous circle on the desk, a slow spiral that told Maria she was nervous to be asking this, nervous at what this request actually said about her new relationship.

So even though she wanted to keep their Thanksgiving tradition of burning a turkey and subsequently ordering Chinese food to herself, Maria raised an eyebrow, smirked, and said, “You mean, can you invite Clint? Sure, and let’s invite Kate, too.” That way, at least, she might not feel quite so much like a third wheel.

She only saw the fractional relax of the redhead’s shoulders because she was looking for it. “Cool,” Natasha said, calm as ever. “We can work out the details next week.” She glanced at her phone and headed for the door. “I have to go track down a lead.” The grin she tossed over her shoulder as she left might have been grateful.

Still, Maria was a little glum as the morning dragged on. Her previous optimism had been trampled by the double whammy of the gala and the conversation about Thanksgiving, and continued to steadily deflate as she finally made her way through the flight manifests. Bucky had flown with Air Berlin, departing at sunrise from Stuttgart and taking a layover in Dusseldorf before arriving at JFK around lunchtime. He’d paid with a credit card, but, upon tracing it, Maria discovered that he’d stopped using the card immediately upon arriving in New York. There wasn’t even a cab fare transaction to point the way; just a $1000 one-way ticket staring her in the face.

Her options were pathetic. She could trawl through the cab pools at JFK with a photo, hoping against hope that some cabbie had taken enough interest in his tattoo to remember it half a year later; option B, in which she called his seatmates from the flight and asked if they remembered sitting next to a brown-haired man named James six months earlier, was even less likely to succeed.  _ It’s hopeless, _ she thought,  _ this entire investigation is a fucking dead-end mess, _ and she was seconds away from pulling her hair out when, to make everything worse, Steve Rogers walked in the door.

“I know you told me to butt out,” he said hastily, entering her office with his hands raised as if to ward off the storm Maria felt brewing over her head.

“And yet?” she asked through gritted teeth: as if this day wasn’t already aggravating enough.

“Trouble just finds  _ me,” _ he insisted, entirely earnest as he unzipped his jacket and took a seat. “Hand to god, I was minding my own business and something just fell into my lap. So, I remembered what you said and brought it to you first.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed Maria a faded envelope. “I’m staying with an old friend of ours, and I’d left a box of stuff there when I moved overseas. This was in a stack of old mail.” He hesitated, then added, “It’s from Becca.”

The envelope was addressed to Bucky, and turned out to contain a birthday card that boasted a collection of multicolored cartoon bears eating cake. “‘Happy Bear-thday’?” Maria read, rolling her eyes. The message inside, however, wiped the skepticism right off her face.  _ Happy birthday, you big oaf. Love, Becca. _ As far as birthday cards went, it was pretty innocuous; something about the brusque pen strokes caught her eye, though, and she squinted at the old card. It was hard to believe, but… She looked back up at Steve, completely serious. “Is this the same handwriting as the postcard?”

“I’m pretty sure,” he said with an unhappy nod, passing over said postcard for comparison. She supposed the careful look on his face was justified, as she was pretty sure the frustration that had been simmering under her skin all morning was now radiating from her in sharp hazardous spikes. Thinking back, Maria realized that the girl hadn’t really lied:  _ I can’t remember the last time I heard from him, _ she’d said,  _ I can’t help you. _ They’d been carefully chosen half-truths, and she’d been so flustered by Steve and so convinced by Becca’s tearful performance that she’d never even questioned them.  _ Some detective you are. _ She dropped her head into her hands, feeling ineffective and foolish. She’d been tricked many times before, but on such a limited caseload, when she should be so focused that no detail would escape her attention, this deception stung more than usual.

Steve’s cautious voice broke into her thoughts. “So what happens now?”

It was clearly time to get off her ass and hit the pavement; after all, hunting people down was what she did best. A few keystrokes pulled up the information she needed, and she abruptly shoved back her chair and stood. “What happens now is we go to lunch,” Maria said, pulling on her coat and yanking the door open with quick tugs, leaving Steve to scramble after her. “You eaten yet? No? Good.”

 

And so Maria found herself in a greasy diner a block from Brooklyn College, watching the steady stream of college students commuting back and forth between the high-rise dorm and the campus. The sticky menu in front of her nose was ostensibly to disguise the fact that she was so closely watching the foot traffic, but also served as a way to avoid Steve’s bright gaze. 

It had been a few stormy blocks before she realized that she’d tacitly invited him along, and she’d mentally thrown her hands up:  _ this might as well happen. _ He’d followed along silently, but now, sitting face to face in the noisy lunchtime rush of the diner, that silence felt foolish. The problem was that she didn’t have a clue what to say. She could try to get rid of him:  _ This was a mistake, please leave. _ Maybe she could apologize for her shoddy detective work: _ Sorry this clue slipped right under my nose. _ Or perhaps she could go with a non-sequitur:  _ What kind of work out do you do to get guns like those? _

The debate was resolved when, after their aproned waitress whisked away with their orders, Steve folded his hands on the table and asked, just a touch too eagerly, “Does this mean that we’re on a real live stakeout?”

Maria rolled her eyes. “I was just going to call it ‘eating lunch,’” she remarked, “but we can call it that if you want.”

He smiled in a way that suggested he didn’t care that he was being teased. “Okay, stakeout it is. What’s the plan? Do we watch in shifts? Or--I can take this window and you can--”

“Oh my  _ god, _ ” Maria groaned, “Would you fucking  _ relax? _ The plan is that we sit here, and when I see Becca, I follow her to her dorm and question her. End of plan.” She sat back with an exasperated huff and muttered, “Civilians.”

To her great surprise, he chuckled. At her questioning glance, he elaborated, “I can’t remember the last time I was considered a civilian. That’s what I get for spending twelve years in the military, I guess.”

His voice was laden with regret, and considering that it would be an hour before the next big rush of students, Maria decided to press; she was an investigator, after all. “If you didn’t enjoy serving, why’d you stay twelve years? You could’ve gotten out after eight.”

He sighed and toyed with his newly delivered coffee, squinting speculatively at a jogger outside the window. “It was a direction; you know, a sense of purpose. Growing up, I always wanted to make a difference, change the world, whatever. It was easier to say that being in the Army achieved that goal than it was to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life.” With a little shrug, he added, “Truthfully, I have no idea what to do with myself now that I’m out of a job.”

Maria had felt similarly adrift after college. She’d graduated top of her class, but without any clue on what to do with her double degrees in government and foreign affairs. Joining the police force was an easy choice in a lot of ways, not the least of which being the relatively cushy detective job Fury offered her within moments of walking into his office. She’d been fortunate enough to be good at her job, earning her promotion to sergeant and then lieutenant so thoroughly that even the biggest skeptics couldn’t claim favoritism; even so, there’d always been the same quiet question she heard in Steve’s story:  _ Is this really what I want to be doing with my life? _

“Well, what do you like to do?” she asked. “Besides annoy private investigators, I mean.” She tacked on a grin so he’d know she was joking, and he smiled.

“Annoying private investigators is my only hobby,” he said, completely solemn except for his dancing blue eyes. 

“I don’t think there’s much money in that,” Maria mused. “Anything else?”

“I like to draw,” Steve offered. “I studied all kinds of art at school, but I still prefer drawing to anything else. And, I mean, I like normal stuff: TV, reading, cooking, but there’s not much chance of a career there.” He paused, pushing his coffee cup between his hands as he gave the question real thought. “I like to work with people,” he said finally, almost self-conscious. “The best part of being in the service was getting to lead this diverse group of people, finding what they were good at and using that to succeed, to make a difference.” He used his hands as he continued talking, hands which Maria now noticed were blackened with what appeared to be charcoal. Evidently, he’d sketched something on the subway trip down from the SHIELD office while she’d been busy grinding her teeth in frustration, and she was now inordinately interested in his long tapered fingers and whatever they’d found interesting enough to commit to paper.

The story about his unit trailed off and Maria belatedly looked up to realize that he’d noticed her staring at his hands. “Sorry,” they each said, and she quickly added, “I didn’t even notice you drawing on the subway.”

“It’s a bad habit,” he admitted with a somewhat repentant grin, “And even when I’m not drawing, I keep the charcoal in my coat pocket so my fingers are always dirty, anyway.” He hesitated, casting a measured glance her way, before shyly offering, “Would you like to see?”

Maria didn’t know all that much about art, but she did know that it was deeply personal. It was difficult to shake the feeling that the sketchbook rustling across the table was a meaningful privilege. Wanting to respect that, she made sure to only study the page he’d opened to, a scene of their crowded car in the middle of the 5 train rush hour. He’d carefully smudged real animation onto the faces of the two teenaged girls who’d shared a set of headphones the whole trip, and captured both the elegance and discomfort of the old woman next to them who’d seemed to be on her first subway trip. It had clearly been a quick sketch, but she was still engrossed in the details, so engrossed that the crash of a fallen coffee cup on the tile floor startled her into dropping the book.

“Shit,” she said, “sorry--” The page had flipped when she dropped the sketchbook, and the rest of her words died off as she recognized her own face recorded in charcoal. It had clearly been drawn on the same subway trip: there was the enormous striped wool scarf that was currently smushed into a corner of their vinyl booth, and there an edge of her bomber jacket’s collar. Though drawn in profile, she was fully familiar with the square jaw she’d inherited from her father and the straight nose that she’d been told was her mother’s. He’d drawn her in sharp angles and shadows that belied the subway’s ever-present fluorescence; it fit her still crackling irritation. It was both fascinating and intimidating to see how a few swipes of charcoal could fully flesh out her towering mood, illustrating her lowered brow, highlighting the flush of anger that rose in her cheeks, hinting at the teeth that ground at the back of her mouth.

Steve snatched the book back and stuffed it into his jacket, his face aflame. “You have a very drawable face,” he muttered, as if  _ that _ didn’t add about twenty more questions to the ones already ringing in her ears. Maria wanted to yank the little black notebook back out of his pocket and carefully peel through each page, wanted to know how often he’d drawn her and what exactly it meant to have a drawable face and why that concept made her breath catch in her throat for a second. 

None of these questions were askable, though, not here across this chipped Formica diner table, and not while Steve’s entire face was an exercise in mortification. “You’re very good,” she said instead, because he was: there was life in his art that had made her fingers itch to turn the page he’d shared. He still looked chagrined, so she pushed the conversation forward by asking if he painted, telling him about the Guggenheim gala she’d just been bullied into attending, and then their food arrived and the rest of the awkwardness was washed down with thick burgers and even thicker milkshakes. 

Once the embarrassment had subsided, Steve proved to actually be kind of funny, with an endearingly unrestrained laugh. Spending this kind of time (or any kind of time, for that matter) with a client was uncharted territory for Maria, but Steve’s willingness to share some of the more ridiculous stories from his unit made it easier for her to talk about her own hijinks while on the force. His anecdotes were revealing: he was intelligent without being pedantic, a prankster without being cruel, compassionate and charming without being too cloyingly sweet. They lingered over pumpkin pie and third cups of coffee, reminding Maria that the next week was Thanksgiving.

“Your face just fell,” Steve pointed out from behind his coffee cup. “Something wrong?”

Maria scrunched up her nose, debating whether she should say anything. Steve waited, and she was positive he wouldn’t mind if she brushed the subject off; but he seemed to actually care, and it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do, nor anyone else to talk to about this subject. “Natasha’s bringing her new boyfriend to our Thanksgiving dinner,” she said with a little sigh, poking at the last of her pie. “Usually it’s just the two of us. I know she’s happy, and it’ll be fine, but--”

Steve nodded sympathetically. “It’s just not what you’re used to,” he said in agreement. “Changes are always worse around the holidays. You want things to be the same every year, or else what’s the point of having a tradition, right?” 

“Exactly.” Maria shrugged and drained her coffee. “But I can’t very well refuse to accept reality. Natasha will bring Clint, and he’s bringing his apprentice Kate and she’ll probably bring her girlfriend, so I’ll be fifth wheeling like a champ.” With a sardonic smile, she added, “If you’re not doing anything else, you’re welcome to join the fun.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but his expression suddenly shifted and what he said was, “There!” Maria turned and saw what, or rather, who he was pointing at: Becca Barnes, strolling down the street under a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers hat. Looking back at Steve, she found his previously good-natured smile had collapsed into a grim line. “That’s Bucky’s hat,” he explained, pulling out his wallet and extracting too much cash for his half of the meal. Paying for lunch was a battle she’d have to fight later, though, because he was already storming out of the diner, eyes never leaving Becca’s profile.

Maria grabbed her coat and flung her scarf around her neck. “Steve!” she called, trying not to break out into an all-out run. Fortunately, he’d gotten caught at a crosswalk, and was now craning his neck to keep Becca in his sights.  _ “Steve,” _ she warned, yanking his elbow to hold him back as the crossing light turned green. “You’re a civilian,” she reminded him, “You have no experience and no authority, which means that I’m in charge. You can either lock it down, or you can go back to the diner and wait there. Which one’s it going to be?”

She waited while he scowled at her, the passing coeds, and the sun reflecting off a parked car. Finally, he dropped his shoulders. “Fine,” he said, turning to cross the street. “Let’s go before she gets away.”

They wove carefully through the crowd of chattering students, trying not to draw attention to the fact that they were slightly too old to pass as one of them. With just a block until they reached the Brooklyn College dorm, they closed the gap. Maria gave Steve a nod before sliding her arm through Becca’s. “We’re turning into the next alley,” she informed the girl. Becca played along, even letting her lips curve into a slight smile as if Maria were a friend who’d just shared something amusing. At the next alley, she turned naturally, waiting until they were in the shadows before yanking her arm out of Maria’s grasp.

“Who are you, really?” she demanded, backing into the wall. “Did he send you? I did everything he asked, so--so tell him to leave me alone! And stay away from Steve!”

Something was very, definitely wrong here. Under Becca’s bravado was genuine fear, and Maria waited to hear Steve’s quick steps in the alley before she stepped forward. “Steve is fine,” she said, speaking in the lowest and calmest voice she had. “I have no intention of hurting him, or you, for that matter.” She walked closer with each word, hands up in a placating gesture, until they were face to face. “I’m a private investigator looking for your brother,” she said at last, “And I think it’s time that you told me what’s really going on.”

Becca looked at Steve, searching for confirmation. Maria saw him nod out of the corner of her eyes, and that was all the girl needed to see before flinging herself forward into Maria’s arms and bursting into tears.


	5. Chapter 5

There was a long list of things that Maria considered herself proficient in. “Consoling hysterical college students” was definitely not on that list. She looked to Steve for help, but his stricken face told her he was just as lost as she was. “Hey,” she tried, patting Becca awkwardly on the back. “Hey, whatever it is, it’ll be okay. I can help you.”

“No you  _ can’t,” _ Becca sobbed, the brim of her baseball hat digging further into Maria’s neck.  _ “Nobody _ can.” 

“Okay,” Maria agreed. She wasn’t about to get into an argument about it here in this alley, where passers by were starting to shoot curious looks in their direction; furthermore, she had no intention of invalidating what were probably some very real and seemingly insurmountable fears. “Maybe I can’t help--but I can listen, if you want. Whatever it is, you’ve been carrying it around for six months. That can’t have been easy.”

The girl mutely shook her head against Maria’s shoulder. For a minute, they all just stood there, Becca gulping and Steve watching in apprehension and Maria trying not to telegraph how uncomfortable she was. Steve caught her eye and sent her an encouraging smile, so apparently she wasn’t doing that great of a job; but Becca stepped back and heaved one of those  _ no more crying _ kind of sighs. “Come up to my dorm,” she said finally. “I’ll tell you everything.”

She was calmer thirty minutes later, a warm mug of tea cradled in her hands. Becca shared a dorm with two other girls, both of whom were elsewhere; still, the cramped living space felt even smaller when filled up with Steve’s large frame and restless energy. He stopped pacing after a few glares pointed in his direction, but, upon dropping on Becca’s threadbare futon, immediately began jiggling his leg. Maria flattened a warning hand across his knee and he looked over, nine parts exasperated but one part suggestive, a brassy kind of smirk on his lips that made her breath stick and her cheeks heat. It hadn’t been her intention, but for half a tick of Becca’s teapot clock she could imagine that  _ possibly, _ just  _ maybe-- _

“So are you actually together or not?” Becca asked, and Maria snatched her hand back into her own lap.

“Not,” she said, clearing her throat, “Like I said, I’m just the investigator looking for your brother. You clearly know where he’s disappeared to,” she gently pointed out, tipping her chin towards the Brooklyn Dodgers hat now discarded on the table. “And you’re clearly in some kind of trouble.” Maria let the sentence trail off as an opening of sorts, less formal than demanding information or falsely assuring that everything would be okay. 

Becca’s little hands gripped her tea tighter. Her fingernails, bitten down to red crescents and painted a chipping murky black, stood out against the white porcelain. “Bucky’s been sending me money since he joined up,” she began, eyes trained on her tea. “After our parents died, he was adamant that he’d pay for me to go to college. He’d get all tough guy, you know: ‘no kid sister of mine’s gonna pay student loans for twenty years.’ I didn’t--” she sighed and set the mug aside. “I knew that he was doing his best, so I didn’t know how to tell him that--well, between the tuition and the housing and the textbooks and everything else, it just wasn’t enough money. But, god, how do you tell your big brother that? I couldn’t. So I went and got a job running deliveries for this gang; nights, weekends, whatever. It totally under the table, but I got paid in cash. It was just barely enough.

“So I kept telling Bucky that I was fine, and it was--until it wasn’t. I got mugged one night up in Crown Heights and lost my delivery. Split lip, bruised rib, and all they wanted to know was what happened to the package. When they found out I’d lost it, they were furious. I obviously didn’t have the money to pay them back, so they told me I had to quit school and work for them full time until I’d repaid them.”

Maria pulled the worn postcard from her jacket and offered it across the coffee table. “So you wrote to your brother.”

Becca took the card and held it carefully by the edges, as if her fingerprints on the writing would smear the ink away. “F and G are our parents, Winifred and George. Mom always went by Fred for short.” Even in the quiet of the dorm, Maria still had to strain to hear the words. “After they died, ‘F and G’ meant ‘emergency’ for us. If one of us said it, we’d meet at their graves at Holy Cross and figure out what to do next. I kinda didn’t think he’d come, being in Germany and all, but a week after I sent the postcard, he was there. He went to Ivan and--”

“I’m sorry, did you say  _ Ivan?”  _ The name was too uncommon to be be a mere coincidence, and the Ivan Maria knew was certainly trouble.

With a one-shouldered shrug, Becca continued her story. “Yeah, he’s the boss. Anyway, Bucky went and cut a deal: he’d work off my debt if they left me alone. I tried to tell him that it wasn’t worth it. It was  _ my _ mistake, so I should be the one who pays for it.” Her voice grew thick as she tried not to cry again, and she dashed angrily at her eyes. “He wouldn’t listen; you know how he gets, Steve. The deal they ended up agreeing to is that Bucky runs with the gang full-time, doing whatever Ivan wants him to do, no questions asked. If he does that, Ivan and the rest of them will leave me alone.” She buried her face in her hands and whispered, “This is all my fault.”

Maria rather thought this was Ivan’s fault, or maybe the college loan system in the grand scheme of things; it was impossible to see how Becca was to blame. She looked over at Steve and found that, over the course of Becca’s story, his charcoal-covered hands had curled into furious fists. His warm smile from earlier in the day had crushed itself into a flat line, so outraged that Maria could feel the heat of his anger. 

She couldn’t blame him for that response: she, too, had no tolerance for the cruel ways of Ivan Petrovich, the merciless man who presided over the Red Room gang. Even so, there wasn’t much use for anger at the moment: she needed information. “None of this is your fault, Becca,  _ none _ of it. Ivan Petrovich has been around for a long time. Even when I was a cop, I couldn’t take him down.” Maria hesitated, then shared, “The woman I work with, Natasha, she used to be his favorite pickpocket. I helped her escape the Red Room, and I think I can help your brother, too. Can I get in contact with him?”

Becca shook her head. “Sometimes, maybe about once a month, he’ll meet me when I go to Holy Cross on Sundays to visit my parents. He won’t tell me where he lives or anything; we just talk about school and stuff.”

The easiest solution was to send him a note through Becca, but considering how stubborn Bucky had proven to be in this situation, he’d probably ignore it. Knowing that, Maria was faced with an unfortunate dilemma.  _ Oh god, _ she warred with herself,  _ Am I really this much of a dick? _ It would be unbelievably rude to invite herself along to the cemetery, unspeakably intrusive; and yet if she didn’t, she had no other way to speak with Bucky. And that assumed that he’d even come to speak to his sister at all: in all likelihood, seeing Maria’s unfamiliar profile would scare him off, or worse, make him think that the Red Room hadn’t honored their deal to leave his sister alone. 

_ But what other choice is there? _ The answer, surprisingly enough, came from Becca. She seemed lightened after sharing her story, but Maria also noted that a certain air of purpose had come over the girl. Perhaps learning that she had allies made her feel like this problem was finally solvable, or maybe she could at last believe that this situation wasn’t her fault now that a third party had absolved her of sin. Whatever it was, Becca set her chin and asked, “Steve, would you come with me to meet him? He said he’d be there the Sunday after Thanksgiving, next week.”

“Of course,” he agreed even before  _ with _ had exited Becca’s mouth. “Of course I will; I’ll do anything to help. But--won’t he…” His brow dropped and his mouth quirked up in rueful thought. “Won’t he run away if I’m there?”

Determination made Becca’s eyes harden. “He’d better goddamn not,” she muttered, then added, “And there’s a tree nearby that you can hide in until he gets there. Otherwise he’ll never come up in the first place.”

_ This is not a great idea. _ Sending an overly eager, somewhat vengeful, and altogether untrained proxy into the field was really just asking for disaster to arrive at her door. But there were no other options, and Becca looked something other than miserable for the first time all day, and Steve was wearing what she was coming to recognize as his “don’t even think about trying to stop me” face.

So Maria gave in. “Alright,” she conceded, as if any of this was ever under her control in the first place. Extracting a business card from her bag, she scribbled her cell phone number on the back before setting it on the coffee table. “Here’s my number so you know it’s me. I’ll contact you in a day or so to coordinate the meeting, and in the meantime you can call me any time you need to talk.” The likelihood of that was doubtful, as Becca was demonstrably averse to seeking aid when problems arose, but Maria felt it was still important to offer, just like it was important to offer a reassuring smile as she and Steve left the tiny dorm apartment. 

“I just want to say,” he said as they exited the dorm vestibule and stood for a moment, letting the November winds shove against them, “I want you to know that I respect the hell out of you, Maria, and I really appreciate that you’ve let me be involved in this. I mean, I know I’m untrained and I know this is dangerous. It’s pretty clear from your face that you don’t think this is a great idea, but I want you to know that I just want to help, and I’m going to listen to everything you say so that we can get Bucky back. I promise.”

Well. That certainly took the wind out of the half-formed lecture she’d felt building in her lungs. “Uh,” she said inelegantly, taken aback by his honesty. Working in the private investigation industry, especially with the two cagiest people on the planet, meant that this type of forthright and genuine statement was uncommon, even though Maria was plenty blunt herself. “I appreciate you saying that,” she said, finally recovering. “We have a lot of work to do if this meeting is going to go well, so I hope you meant it when you said you were going to listen to everything I say. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” Steve confirmed, his blue gaze positively radiating sincerity. “Whatever you say goes.” He fell into step alongside her as they headed for the subway station, but not before Maria saw the smallest flash of excitement enter his eyes. He was going to listen, for sure, but she was still going to be wrangling his Sherlock Holmes fantasies. She barely stopped herself from groaning.  _ This is the worst idea ever. _

 

The Worst Idea Ever, though, turned out to be the many meetings she and Steve had as the week of Thanksgiving rolled around, which revealed that her stomach now did a stupid little jump when he gifted her with an excited smile or a playful nudge. The Worst Idea Ever could also have been awarded to Maria’s decision to tell Natasha about this phenomenon while the latter dragged her around the greater Manhattan area searching for suitable ballgowns for the Guggenheim Gala, a fate to which Maria had fully resigned herself. But no, Maria realized as the Thanksgiving Day parade rolled off her television, the Worst Idea Ever was this: inviting Natasha and Clint and Kate and America for dinner, leaving her the fifth wheel and opening her imagination to the possibility that Steve could have been her date. 

It was an absolutely ludicrous suggestion, she’d told both herself and Natasha a dozen times, because Steve was her client and Steve was hunting down his ex and Steve was in no way interested in coming to her home for Thanksgiving dinner. Not to mention, she’d told Natasha’s particularly unimpressed face, that he was far too impulsive and was currently unemployed and his fingers were always dirty!

Still, the thought lingered as Maria mashed their first round of potatoes, which would be eaten before any of their guests arrived. If Steve were her date, she might behave more like Natasha was, religiously checking the turkey because for once it might actually matter if it burned or not. If she knew Steve was going to be there, she might not feel a hovering storm cloud at the prospect of all the hand-holding and tender glances she was going to be accidentally intercepting all night long. 

She brushed those thoughts away. It always mattered if the turkey charred or not, and Clint surely knew he’d have no leg to stand on if he complained about it burning. These people were her friends, or at least the closest approximation to that concept, and she at least sort of liked them and was (usually) grateful they were in her life. So she put away all thoughts of Steve and wheels, helped Natasha zip the back of her dress, and committed to being thankful that she had people to share the day with.

They arrived together, the quiet friendship of just Maria and Natasha in the morning erupting into Kate’s boisterous laughter and America’s sly sass and Clint’s constant stream of terrible jokes. Natasha, usually the epitome of composure, looked torn, holding asparagus under the faucet far too long while her eyes strayed to the living area where Clint made a circus production out of pouring wine. Maria took pity on her. “Go,” she said, turning off the water and taking the vegetables out of her friend’s hands. “I can handle this.”

Natasha’s eyes closed in fleeting relief. “You’re the best,” she said in rare sincerity before drying her hands and departing for the couch. Clint handed her a wine glass with a flourish, the hearts in his eyes so simple and absolute that Maria had to find something to busy herself with. She peeled and chopped, measured and stirred, and somewhere along the way a hand holding a glass of wine materialized in her line of sight. It was Kate, straight black eyebrows raised in a silent question:  _ you want help? _ And so the two of them were bustling around, with dinner nearly ready, when there was a knock at the door.

Maria set down her spoon and sighed. Mrs. Busby, her elderly antagonist of a neighbor, seemed to take a certain joy in knocking at random moments to make cutting remarks about Maria’s odd hours and lack of husband. She normally opted to ignore the old woman, but it was Thanksgiving, for fuck’s sake, and she’d had enough wine to make it apparent that this was the perfect opportunity to put the harpy in her place. Leaving Kate at the stove, she stomped to the door, already formulating her argument. “You know what, Agatha, I have never been anything other than polite to you, other than that one time with the groceries, and I was having a bad day that day, and anyway there’s just  _ no _ reason for this--”

But it was Steve on the other side of the door, seemingly sprung fully formed out of her irrepressible imagination, a veritable god with golden hair. “Who’s Agatha?” he asked, amused, before hastily adding, “I hope I’m not too late,” and thrusting a bouquet of violets into Maria’s confused hands. “I wasn’t sure what to bring, so I brought flowers. Oh, and cheese; everyone likes cheese, right?”

“Uh--” Maria said, struck utterly dumb with how entirely unprepared she was for this encounter. He seemed nervous, his free hand tugging at the shirt collar under his sea blue sweater; he also seemed to think that she’d been expecting him. Disabusing him of this idea seemed unnecessarily unkind, but Maria had no idea what she was supposed to say instead. In fact, she wasn’t positive that this wasn’t some kind of surreal wine-infused hallucination and she was actually still talking to Agatha Busby. The flowers in her hands were real, though, and Steve was starting to look at her a little strangely, so Maria stepped back and gestured him in. “You’re not late,” she said at last instead of asking what time he’d thought he was supposed to be there, or why he thought he was supposed to be there at all. “Come meet everyone else.”

Leading Steve into the living room kicked up a flurry of introductions for her to make and sneaking glances for her to ignore, and somehow by the end of it Clint was handing Steve a drink while Natasha dragged Maria into the kitchen under the pretense of getting food on the table. 

“I  _ thought _ you said inviting Steve was a bad idea,” Natasha murmured, taking the flowers from Maria’s hands and cutting their stems under the running water. 

Remembering that she was supposed to be useful, Maria went to the pantry to find a vase. “It  _ is _ a bad idea!” she hissed upon return, lowered voice covered up by the water now splashing into the glass urn. “And I  _ didn’t _ invite him!”

“Then why did he text you  _ this?” _ Natasha had a tendency to turn into a 90’s television detective sometimes, enacting dramatic reveals as if she were Jessica Fletcher herself. With the flowers arranged, she now brandished Maria’s own phone at her like a particularly damning legal document.  _ “‘Hey, is it still okay if I come for Thanksgiving?’” _ she read aloud with an expectant smirk. “That sounds like you invited him.”

Maria, busy cooking, hadn’t seen her phone in hours, and the pieces fell into place with a thunderous roaring in her ears. “You did  _ not,” _ she gasped, snatching her phone away. Sure enough, Natasha appeared to have answered for her. “‘ _ Definitely, I’m glad you decided to come’ _ ?” she read in disbelief, eyes snapping back up. “You gave him my address?  _ Natasha!” _

Natasha’s green eyes slid down to the right, unsure for the first time. “I figured you’d invited him and were just chickening out like you always do, and I felt bad that you were going to be fifth wheeling, because I know you mind even if you say you don’t. I just--” she said, faltering under Maria’s purely murderous glare, “It’s just--look, he’s interested, okay, or he wouldn’t be here, and you’d see that if you’d get your head out of the sand; and anyway you’ve done so much for me and you’re my best friend and I just want you to be happy, alright?”

This all came out in one fierce whisper while Natasha’s face got redder and redder and the dishrag in her hands twisted smaller and smaller. Maria crushed her hands over her eyes and tried to take deep, even breaths.  _ She just wants to help, _ she told the berserker beat of her heart.  _ This is just how she shows she cares. _ It was weird to be heartened by such an intrusion, but considering that Natasha had learned to scheme before she could read, this plot was positively sweet. 

“Okay,” Maria sighed at last. She was having far too many of these  _ why the hell not _ moments lately, but they had more than enough food and Steve was already there and maybe the butterflies in her stomach would settle once the turkey was on the table.

“Okay?” Natasha asked, a bit of penitence mixed into her hopeful expression. “Really?”

“Really,” Maria confirmed, though she was suddenly consumed with self-consciousness: she’d been cooking for hours, and now regretted settling to wear something more comfortable than cute. “But, um--shouldn’t I wear something--else?” She gestured vaguely at herself.

Natasha pursed her lips and picked up her wine. “I see what you mean,” she mused, adding, “Sorry,” before deliberately tossing the glass at Maria and shouting, “Shit!” loud enough for everyone to hear. As the heads in the living room craned in their direction, Natasha shoved her towards the stairs. “I can handle this,” she said, echoing their earlier exchange. “Go.”

_ I guess that’s what friends are for? _ Maria speculated as she scaled the steps to her bedroom and stripped out of her now sodden dress. At least the wine was white and the dress was cotton, so nothing was ruined; and it wasn’t as if Natasha had exactly given her a choice, but she still felt foolish as she stood in her underwear and stared into her closet, willing something to leap out at her and yell  _ Wear me! _

Of course, nothing did, so she was still in her underwear and trying not to panic when Kate bounded into the room five minutes later. “We’re ready,” she declared. “Why aren’t you dressed?” Without waiting for an answer, she reached into the closet and held out a candy red dress Maria had bought on a dare and never worn. “This one, obviously,” she said, shaking the hanger impatiently until Maria reluctantly took the dress and stepped into it. “And this necklace, and these earrings, and these shoes. Yeah,” she said, surveying the final product with a satisfied nod. “Hot. Now let’s eat, I’m fucking starving.”

The tornado that was Kate Bishop meant that Maria didn’t have time to second guess any style choices. Chalking another mental tally in the  _ sure, why not? _ column, Maria followed Kate downstairs and found that her dining table was now practically buckling under all the food they’d prepared. Someone had lit candles and dimmed the lights, drenching her apartment in warm gold and shadows. The table was perfect, not just because of the flawless turkey, but because of the people around it: America and Kate laughing at Clint stealing a bite, the affectionate light in Natasha’s eyes as she slapped his hand away, and Steve, Steve with gilt edging his hair and a raw, knee-wobbling interest filling his gaze as she made her way across the room to take her seat next to him at the head of the table.

It seemed like she was supposed to say something, being the host and all, so she lifted her wineglass. “I’ve been anxious about this night for a week now,” she confessed, “But now that you’re all here, I--well, I’d be an idiot to change anything. Happy Thanksgiving.” It didn’t feel like enough, but they all nodded and drank as if they’d understood that she’d never before felt this kind of belonging in her life.

 

After dinner, Natasha volunteered herself and Clint for clean-up duty: part penance and part (Maria suspected) opportunity to make out in the pantry. Barred from the kitchen and with Kate and America already succumbing to a tryptophan coma, Maria found herself awkwardly idle, perched in the window seat between her bookcases while the table was cleared. 

Eventually, Steve came to sit next to her, a wineglass in each hand. “Your home is lovely,” he told her, handing over one of the glasses. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“I’m glad you came,” Maria said, more honestly than intended. Forget keeping her cards close to her chest: Maria didn’t take gamble, didn’t take risks, didn’t even enter the casino at all. But  _ god, _ he’d spent the entire evening leaning into her conversation, laughing that whole body laugh, seamlessly meshing into her friend group and flashing the happiest smile she’d seen yet. And now he was sitting next to her, closer than strictly necessary, and the proximity was making it difficult to breathe. She stood and offered him her free hand. “Would you like a tour?”

“I’d love one,” he said. There was something more than friendship in his grin, something that chased down her spine when he took her hand and didn’t let go. Under the sounds of clinking dishes that echoed from the kitchen, Maria led Steve up the stairs to the second floor of her condo. There was the tiny guest room at the top of the stairs, the office that had enough books to be a library, and finally her own bedroom, fortuitously devoid of any piles of dirty laundry. Her favorite part of her home, though, was the rooftop terrace that was only accessible from the stairwell along her bedroom wall. Being that it was a late November night and their coats were stowed downstairs, Maria pulled quilts from her linen closet and piled them over her shoulder before finally taking Steve’s hand again and climbing the stairs into the night. When it was clear, like it was this evening, she could see the waves crashing up against Pier 5 of the Brooklyn Bridge Park a few blocks down the street. Brooklyn Heights afforded a gorgeous view of Manhattan, especially at night, when the skyscrapers splashed fuzzy rectangles of light onto the East River and the moon hung low in the sky. 

It took some maneuvering, but soon they were each wrapped in a quilt and tucked together on a bench. With her feet curled up beneath her, Maria pointed out the sights visible above the treeline, trying to highlight things Steve might be interested in drawing. “In the morning, the sun rises in that direction,” she pointed, “And every leaf on that oak tree is outlined in light. It’s the most beautiful time of day to be up here.”

“I can imagine,” Steve murmured, but he was looking at her, not the horizon, and she felt her composure slipping as quickly as the quilt around her shoulders. Even in the moonlight, he managed to look golden, the lights from neighboring windows dusting glitter into his hair.

If she didn’t look away, she was going to do something regrettable. “I like it better at night, though,” she said. “Not as loud, you know, and so much more peaceful. The moon and I have always gotten along better.”

“That makes sense,” he said thoughtfully. He was studying her, eyes charting over her cheekbones and nose, meeting her own eyes before flitting down to her lips. Maria got the impression that this was what it was like, being sketched by Steve Rogers, the sole focus of his entire attention. It was a thrilling sensation, gratifying, electric, and when his thumb brushed her neck as he pulled her slipping quilt back up her shoulder, a jolt of exhilaration shot through her system.

He noticed; she was beginning to realize that there wasn’t much he didn’t. “Are you cold?” he asked, sliding closer to offer the body heat she absolutely should run from.  _ And I will, _ she told herself,  _ in a minute. I’ll push him back in a minute. _ It was too dangerous to stay here, with nothing to feel but his warm hand on her arm, nothing to look at but the stars reflected in his eyes, nothing to do but lean closer, closer… 

This time, when her quilt drifted down her shoulder, he didn’t let go after tugging it into place; instead, his hand skimmed from her shoulder and across her collarbone and up the column of her neck, coming to rest at the back of her head. “This is a bad idea,” he said, clearly trying to convince himself even as his fingers wove into her hair. “You should tell me no.”

“I should,” Maria agreed with a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. “This is a terrible idea.” But the inch between them was dwindling, the stars in his eyes were brightening, and the only coherent thought she could manage was  _ why the fuck not? _ “A very--” (there was still time to pull away) “--bad--” (this was absolutely her last chance) “--idea.”

There was nothing at all bad about the way his lips felt against hers, warm and firm and better than she’d let herself envision. If Steve was surprised, he recovered quickly, surging forward with an enthusiastic groan that reverberated down to her toes. There was caution in the way he pulled her closer, as if she would at any moment slap him and run away; but she let him wrap her in the solid heat of his arms and kissed him so deeply that he gasped when he finally pulled back.

_ “Wow,” _ he panted, kissing her again like an exclamation mark. “Well. If that’s you idea of a bad idea, I’d  _ love _ to see a good one.”

Maria’s brain supplied a whole host of good ideas: sending him home and then moving to New Mexico sounded particularly promising, as did the brilliant suggestion to tell him that she was joining the Peace Corps and leaving tomorrow. Looking at his grin, though--half bold, half shocked, all tremendously alluring--the  _ why the fuck not _ voice in her head once again took over. “I have lots of good ideas,” she murmured, lips brushing his with every word, “And they all involve going back inside where it’s warm.”

“You’re right,” Steve said, easy smile spreading across his face. “That’s a great idea.” He stood and pulled her up with him, flattening his big hands at the small of her back and kissing her so thoroughly she thought her legs might give out. A few steps later he kissed her again, hands now resting on her hips, and then again, pinning her against the wall of the stairwell. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking anything but, “You’re just  _ amazing _ in the moonlight.”

And it was then that Maria realized: Steve Rogers was going to be a much bigger problem than she’d originally thought.


	6. Chapter 6

“You  _ slept _ with him?”

“Would you  _ shut up--” _ Maria whipped her head around, checking to see if anyone in the department store had heard. There was only one old woman giving her a judgemental glare, so Maria smiled apologetically before turning back to Natasha. “I did not  _ sleep _ with him,” she hissed, “I just slept  _ next _ to him.”

“Uh huh,” Natasha said, voice positively dripping with skepticism. 

“Well it’s the truth,” Maria huffed, turning her attention to the hideous dress on the rack in front of her. She loathed Black Friday shopping, but the Guggenheim Gala was a week away and she still needed a dress, so Natasha had more or less coerced her into braving the crowds that clogged the city sidewalks. Maria was tempted to just buy the first dress that fit, but Natasha had nixed everything she’d tried on so far, probably in recognition of the fact that Maria was trying to bolt. They were on their third store and were rapidly diverging in terms of temperament: Natasha became more enthusiastically determined, while Maria grew stubborn and cranky. 

Part of that crankiness, she knew, had nothing to do with Natasha and everything to do with her regrets about the previous night. Sure, Steve did incredible things with his mouth, and sure, she fit into his arms as if they’d been made just for her; but after he brushed a kiss over her cheek and tiptoed out that morning, Maria had lain awake and stared at the ceiling in dread. Dramatic though it seemed, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Aside from the fact that she barely knew the man and that he was probably still pining for either his missing ex-boyfriend _or_ -girlfriend, hooking up with a client was just bad form, especially in the middle of an investigation. _You used to have better self-control,_ she’d berated herself, _better impulse control._ _You used to ask “why?” instead of “why not?”_ She’d had every intention of staying in bed and wallowing in her idiocy all day, but Natasha had shown up to go shopping and refused to take no for an answer. So now she was here, wondering how much trouble she’d get in if she hid under the clothes racks like she had as a child.

“Okay,” Natasha huffed, heaving an alarming number of dresses in Maria’s field of vision. “Try these last few on, and then I promise we can go to the Grotto and have a beer.”

“Fine,” Maria grumbled, too grumpy to acknowledge that Natasha was being nice. She snatched the pile of dresses and stomped into a changing room. Whether it was her mood or the clothing itself, nothing fit: too big, too small, too boxy or flouncy or lacy or ugly. By the time Maria got herself into the last dress, Natasha’s steady stream of vetoes was so automatic that she almost didn’t look up.

“Nope-- _ Wait,” _ Natasha said, looking up from her magazine.  _ “Yes.  _ That’s the one, take it.”

“Are you sure?” Maria asked, turning cautiously in the trifold mirror. “Isn’t it a bit… much?”

“It’s perfect,” Natasha insisted. “Seriously, would I lie to you?”

Maria rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she retorted. “You lie to me all the time.”

Natasha shrugged, the picture of innocence. “I haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re talking about,” she sniffed. With a sly grin she added, “If you don’t want to believe me, we can just ask Steve for his opinion. I’m sure he’d  _ love _ for me to send him a picture.” 

The only respectable action at that point was to turn around and stalk back into the dressing room before Natasha could see that Maria’s entire face was consumed in a flustered blush.

 

Maria tried not to panic when Steve was late. There were any number of reasons that he could be late for the debrief after meeting with Bucky, like visiting others laid to rest, or getting caught in traffic, or  _ running into Ivan and getting stabbed-- _

She took a deep breath and sat on her hands to prevent herself from texting Steve and asking for an update.  _ He’s a grown-ass man, _ she reminded herself.  _ He can take care of himself. You can trust him. _

That realization was somewhat disconcerting. Maria trusted Nick, who had filled the shoes her father had long ago declined; her trust for Natasha had been slowly built over a matter of years. She wasn’t about to put her life in Steve’s hands, no, but she was hard pressed to think of another person that she’d even consider giving the kind of access she was giving Steve.  _ Access to the case, that is, _ she clarified to herself, although she’d never made out with a client, either.

Thankfully, her phone buzzed before her mind could trail down that path.  _ Be there soon, _ Steve’s text read, and Maria felt a fog of relief lift from around her shoulders. She’d always preferred to be in the thick of things, planning a sting and then coordinating every single step from inception to execution. In those instances, at least, she’d been tapped into the operation, her officers wearing wires and body cameras so she could see and hear everything. Being sidelined like this, impotent and unable to see what was happening or effect any sort of outcome, was the stuff of her nightmares. Having to trust someone so completely felt awful, discomfort itching like poison ivy under her collar.

And yet she trusted Steve in the field with something close to entirety. His enthusiasm for playing detective had subsided into an effort defined by deliberation and determination to see Bucky. He’d proven himself reliable as they’d planned this meeting, contributing valuable information about his friend and soberly listening to her warnings about the Red Room and their operatives. It wasn’t as if people usually ignored her when she spoke, but she appreciated that he was willing to take direction instead of assuming that his military experience meant that he knew everything.

On Sundays, the SHIELD office was empty, so the sound of the front door swinging open was audible even from her desk. Despite the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d hugged anyone, Maria felt a strange urge to go out and embrace him: reuniting with Bucky and everything he meant to Steve couldn’t have been easy. It would be so simple, offering a comforting smile and a shoulder to lean on; but that would also mean offering emotional connection and support in an explicit  _ I care about you _ sort of way, which was terrifying on about five different levels.

She settled for leaning against her desk in feigned nonchalance, only the clench of her hands around the edge of the cherry desktop indicating her tension. Steve at last pushed into her office, brows lowered and eyes grim. “What happened?” Maria asked, her tentative smile falling off her face as she began to come forward in spite of herself.

Instead of answering, Steve waved into the hall and suddenly there, in her office, was Bucky Barnes. Steve had described his best friend as charming and mischievous, claiming Bucky was more charismatic and flirtatious and confident than himself. The man who stood in front of her, though, was none of those things. Six months in the Red Room had hardened his grey eyes, leaving him shifting and suspicious, uncomfortable in his own skin. He appeared to have not cut his hair since joining the gang, and it hung to his chin in shaggy unkempt waves, brushing the stubble on his unshaven jaw. 

Maria felt her eyes go wide in spite of herself. Bringing Barnes into SHIELD had never, in any way, shape, or form, been part of the plan, and she had no idea what the  _ fuck _ Steve thought he was doing; but before she could ask him exactly that, he cleared his throat and said, “Buck, this is Maria Hill, the investigator I’ve been working with.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she said, slowly extending her hand. He seemed to think that her caution was a result of fear rather than confusion: she could see regret and bitterness in his eyes as he shook her offered hand. When he released it, she gestured both men into the seats on the other side of her desk. “Steve may or may not have mentioned,” she began, directing her comments at Bucky but her glare at his friend, “But this wasn’t exactly the plan for today. I know that Steve likes to…  _ improvise, _ we’ll say, so perhaps you two might tell me what happened?”

Bucky snorted and knocked Steve on the arm. “Well, she’s certainly got  _ your _ number, ya punk,” he murmured with a smirk.

Steve grimaced. “Shut  _ up,” _ he shot back. The look he turned to her was earnest and apologetic, his hands folded together in unconscious mimicry of prayer. “Maria, I’m  _ sorry.  _ It was a split second decision--”

“That you didn’t think I should have an opinion on.”

“No, I--”

“No, let me rephrase: it’s not that you didn’t think I should have an opinion, it’s that you didn’t  _ want _ to hear my opinion,” Maria continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Because you  _ knew _ that if you called and said, ‘Hey, Maria, would it be cool if I brought an active Red Room affiliate to your office,’ I would have said no.”

The angles of Steve’s face sharpened into a mulish expression. “Bucky is  _ not _ a Red Room operative,” he said, tone like cut steel. 

Maria threw up her hands in exasperation. “What do you mean he’s not a Red Room operative?” she snapped, waving in Bucky’s direction. “He’s wearing their fucking jacket! Barnes, do you or do you not work for Ivan Petrovich?”

Bucky looked regretfully at Steve. “I do,” he said, loudly adding, “Well, what do you want me to say, Steve, I do!” when Steve looked betrayed.

_ “Under duress,” _ Steve ground out. “He’s not dangerous; he deserves protection.”

“Of  _ course _ he deserves protection,” she snapped, letting  _ you fucking idiot _ hang unsaid. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. Suppose this was all a ruse set up by Ivan to track down Natasha? You’ve just led one of his top members  _ right _ to her door.  _ And,” _ she persisted, because Steve was still glowering, “Even if Bucky isn’t loyal to Ivan, there are plenty of others who are, and who could have followed you here, making the outcome the same. If you had called me, I could have suggested a neutral location for us to meet, on a different day so that you wouldn’t be observed walking away together, and somewhere that wouldn’t put my best friend’s life in danger; but no, Steve, you’re clearly just going to do whatever the hell  _ you _ want, no matter the consequences.”

Her glassed-in office fell silent but for the sound of the clock steadily ticking in contrast with Maria’s erratic heartbeat. Even when she’d found him in Bucky’s abandoned apartment, she hadn’t been this angry. That had been ignorance, but this was foolhardy, a classic case of act-first-think-later; this was the very antithesis of Maria Hill, agent of SHIELD.  _ I trusted you, _ she thought furiously in his direction, and from the way he looked dejectedly at his hands, she wondered if he could hear her.  _ Don’t you know how rare that is? I trusted you to follow the plan. I thought we were a team. _

The contract was clearly over: his friend had been found and she could officially wash her hands of this catastrophe of an investigation. Maybe she’d take Fury’s vacation offer after all, go visit a new city and have a mindless fling with someone who wasn’t a client, who wasn’t made up of nobility and recklessness and marble-sculpted beauty, who wouldn’t tie her insides up in knots.

Before she could ask him to leave, Steve pushed his chair back and stood. “I’m very sorry,” he said quietly, his eyes painfully honest. “The way I behaved today was thoughtless, careless, and unprofessional. You expected more from me, and I’m sorry to have let you down.” He swallowed hard, perhaps hoping that a pause would leave room for her to jump up and ask him to stay and work it out. Part of her badly wanted to, but that was why she always listened to her mind and not her heart, or at least tried to: her mind never got her into trouble like this. So she sat resolutely until he nodded and said, “We’ll get out of your life before anything can happen. C’mon, Buck.”

Bucky, however, stayed in his seat, and Maria realized that he was watching her. Slowly, she turned her attention from Steve to his friend and found him smiling with a strange familiarity, maybe even kinship. His eyes had been hard and distrusting when he’d entered the office, but now they were bright, sharp with perception that made her churning emotions feel transparent.

“If it helps,” he said, “and I think it will, he does this kind of thing literally all the time, for as long as I’ve known him.” He grinned and Maria could at last see what Steve was talking about when he called Bucky charismatic. “The first day we met, he threw himself into this fist fight with a kid three times bigger, all because the guy had had taken this kindergartener’s lunch money. His first day of school, and all I got for bailing him out of that fight was a black eye and a lifetime of dragging him away from shit he doesn’t need to get into.”

“Is this really necessary?” Steve asked, muffled by the hands now covering his face.

“Yes,” Bucky and Maria said as one: she might have been mad at him, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to hear stories of his childhood idiocy. Bucky grinned and continued, “As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, Steve is a punk. I’ve had this argument with him at least a thousand times, but he’s evolutionarily deficient and doesn’t have a fight or flight mechanism the way the rest of us normal humans do.”

Maria cast a baleful look in Steve’s direction. “All fight, no flight?” she guessed, and he flushed adorably; or, at least, what  _ would _ be adorable were she not furious with him.

“Exactly,” Bucky nodded, clearly enjoying the shades of mortification painting Steve’s face. “So we agree: Steve is the biggest idiot in Manhattan--”

“In the state of New York, at least,” Maria muttered.

“Hey,” Steve protested.

“--Absolutely,” Bucky spoke over him. “Steve is the worst person on the east coast… but we still need your help.”

“My help,” Maria repeated, voice flat in disbelief. Steve appeared to be staring at Bucky, so she did, too, positive that he was going crazy.  _ “My _ help? After all this? You must be out of your goddamn mind, Barnes.”

“He is,” Steve said emphatically, curling a hand over his friend’s shoulder. “We’ll be going now,” but Bucky pushed the hand off and kept his keen eyes on Maria.

“There is something,” Bucky said, deliberate and slow, “That Ivan Petrovich wants more than anything else, that Ivan Petrovich would do anything to get his hands on.”

Wary of sharing too many details, Maria made her voice cold, lethal. “If you’re asking me to find the Black Widow he’s misplaced, the answer is no. I’m not bartering your freedom for someone else’s.”

Bucky looked startled. “What? No, god no.” He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper, worn and soft as if he held it often. “When I took Becca’s place, Ivan offered me a buy-out of sorts. If I could acquire an item for him, he’d call our debt paid. Bullshit, of course, but I played along and got him to write it out and sign it.”

Maria shook her head, intrigued despite herself. “That’s still bullshit,” she said. “He’ll rip it up or call it a forgery.”

He had the same kind of smile as Natasha sometimes: all teeth, no cheer. She wondered if that was the first thing the gang taught their new recruits. “Of course he will,” he agreed easily. “But I don’t care, because now I know what he wants.” His hands smoothed out the paper and he passed it across the desk to Maria, ignoring Steve craning his neck to read:  _ I, Ivan Petrovich, swear to release James and Rebecca Barnes of their contract upon receipt of the Tesseract. _

As a supervisor of her precinct’s gang task force, Maria heard about this item before: a legendary hard drive that held the names of drug contacts, arms dealers, hit men, and various other evildoers. Constantly disappearing and resurfacing, the tesseract rendered any possessing gang the most powerful in the city. Last she’d heard, it was in the hands of the Sinister Six.

“This is my ticket out,” Bucky said fervently. “If we steal the Tesseract from Hydra, who has it right now--”

“We?” Maria asked, just as Steve choked out, “Hydra?”

“I can’t do it alone,” Bucky argued, gesturing expansively. “Ivan finally trusts me, which means he’s stopped having me followed, but I still can’t do the kind of recon that I’ll need to get this done.”

“So have Steve do it,” Maria said, sending a withering glare in his direction. “He already knows how to stick his nose places it doesn’t belong.”

Bucky winced. “Unfortunately, Steve’s already stuck his nose in Hydra’s business. We… sorta went to high school with a few of their head guys,” he added, reeling off a short list of names for Steve’s benefit. “As you know, Steve doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone, so it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that he’s kicked the shit out of these guys before and that they will  _ definitely _ recognize him.”

“Of course,” Maria sighed. Of course they couldn’t do it without her. Of course she was the only hope for getting the Barnes family out of this nightmare. Of course she couldn’t just walk away from this cluster fuck of an investigation. She buried her face in her hands. “Could you go to the waiting room for a minute? I need to think.”

She heard a shuffle of feet and the door swinging shut, but when she looked up, Steve was still there, fingers worrying the zipper of his jacket. “I wasn’t sure if you meant me, too,” he said awkwardly, his long eyelashes sweeping against his cheeks in a downcast expression. “But clearly you did, so I’ll go, I just--I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

When he was gone, Maria leaned back in her chair and studied the water stain on her ceiling, a shapeless blob the color of coffee. She wished she had coffee, or a scotch.  _ Definitely a scotch, _ she corrected herself, scrubbing her hands over her cheeks. There wasn’t really any option here, even if she was still so angry with Steve that she could scream. She’d help Barnes because it was the right thing to do, because Ivan Petrovich was a monster who she could destroy if she managed to pull it off right. Still, this decision would go down better if paired with a stiff drink or two, so she decided to call Natasha and see if she’d keep her company at the bar so she wasn’t drinking alone. 

“Hello?” Natasha answered, sleep mingling the syllables. “Maria? It’s so early.”

“Right,” Maria said, feeling more foolish by the second even though it was well past 10. She could hear Clint mumbling in the background, could hear Natasha whispering to him with a smile in her voice, and she felt so intrusive on their intimate morning that it was nearly unbearable. “Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn’t have called.”

“Wait,” Natasha said, more alert. “Hold on. What’s wrong? Today was the meet, right? Did something happen with Steve?” From the whoosh of air swooping through the speakers, Maria guessed that Natasha had thrown the covers back; from the cry of outrage in the background, she guessed that Clint was not happy with this development.

“No,” Maria said swiftly, “Nothing’s wrong--I mean, well, except: I think I’m going after the Tesseract, and also I think Steve and I are never speaking again?” 

The other side of the line was quiet for a long moment, and then Natasha said, “Damn, Hill, you really know how to fuck shit up. I’ll meet you at the Grotto in twenty.”

_ Thank god. _ Maria hauled her coat on and closed her office door with a slam that made Steve and Bucky, deep in conversation on the couch, look up in surprise. 

“I’ll take the case,” she said tersely, walking to the front door and holding it open. “But right now, I’m leaving, so you are, too. We’ll start tomorrow,” she said, using her best  _ don’t argue with me _ voice. “And if you’re not ready for me to run this operation,”she added with a pointed glare at Steve, “Don’t even think about showing up and wasting my time.”


	7. Chapter 7

Hydra had grown in the years since Steve had graduated high school. What had once been a handful of racist punks muttering resentfully in back alleys had developed into an arms empire with cells in every borough. Of course, these cells were called the “heads” of Hydra, because they were very caught up in their own mythology: deputies called “barons” and whispered secret passwords and a fanatical devotion to their leader, referred to as the Red Skull. Maria found the whole thing tiresome and childish, more like an adolescent secret club, just with more guns. This insight would have made Steve’s eyes crinkle in a smile, she thought, but she was still coldly furious with him and he was busy, anyway, staring at her assortment of Hydra mugshots spread across the conference room table.

“Arnim Zola?” he asked, fingertips drifting over the doughy round face on the page. “Seriously? He’s running with these jackasses now?”

“Zola seems to be the only one who went to college,” Maria shared. “He’s got a few degrees, actually: one each in robotic and mechanical engineering.”

“The rest of these guys picked on him relentlessly,” Steve said, still puzzled. “And he sucked at everything; I mean, he even got picked after me in dodgeball, and I was 95 pounds soaking wet.”

“Maybe they’re interested in something other than his dodgeball abilities,” Maria said acidly without looking up from her file.

Steve sighed. “You know that’s not what I meant. Zemo, Strucker, Schmidt, they were all thick as thieves back in high school. I’m not at all surprised to learn that they never amounted to much of anything, but it’s hard to believe they’d change their mind about accepting Zola. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s a lot of money in crime,” Maria pointed out, letting her softened tone function as an apology. “Maybe Schmidt made him an offer he couldn’t afford to turn down. Or--I mean, plenty of people never grow out of their high school mentality. I know I--" She hadn’t made make many friends at the exclusive prep school her father sent her to. It had been more fun to take every possible troublemaking opportunity that arose, because regardless of whether she smoked under the bleachers or stole a teacher’s car, her father would always find a way to smooth it over with the headmaster. She’d changed in many ways since then, found ways to control that internal turbulence; but she was often just as insecure, just as headstrong, just as restless as she’d been as a teen. Despite the fact that Steve had been noble while she’d just been rebellious, Maria suspected that their mutual inability to stay away from trouble would have made them friends back then. 

_Back then,_ she emphasized to herself. _Not now._ _Now that kind of impulsivity is nothing but trouble._ She shook her head. “Anyway, maybe this was Zola’s chance to finally be accepted by his bullies. What matters is that they’re allied now, regardless of what they were to each other before.”

Steve mulled that over for a moment, then shrugged that it was a possibility, and they continued to push through the information Maria had convinced a friend still on the force to slide into her bag at the bar the night before. The first challenge of stealing the Tesseract was locating it, a task which was made especially difficult by Hydra’s love of secrecy. They had rough outlines of the gang’s territory in each borough, but no clear building marked as the actual meeting place. Even more frustrating was that Hydra intentionally maintained an equal size across all their cells, making it hard to pinpoint which location was their headquarters. Without an indicator like significantly higher foot traffic or rates of incidences, they were left to guess which location might house the Tesseract.

“Well, it’s Brooklyn, obviously,” Steve said, jabbing a finger at the map Maria had tacked to the conference room cork board; at the same time, she pointed at the isolated activity to the north and said, “The logical answer is the Bronx.”

“The  _ Bronx?” _ Steve repeated in disbelief. “Why in the world would Hydra put their headquarters all the way up there?”

Maria felt her shoulders rise defensively. “It makes plenty of sense,” she said, trying to keep her tone from tipping towards argumentative. “For one thing, there is statistically less crime in the Bronx, making it easier for them to either lay low or spread their influence if they want. With the Red Room dominating Brooklyn, Hydra could have decided to stake out the Bronx as their own. It’s a rational explanation.”

“These guys were born and raised in Brooklyn,” Steve shot back, “and if there’s one thing racist assholes like to do, it’s hold onto their territory and push the unwanted population  _ out. _ Why would they leave the place where their beliefs first took hold? Not everything needs to be explained with  _ logic,” _ he scoffed. “I know you hate it when this happens, but some of us actually let our  _ emotions _ help us make decisions once in a while.”

Never had a greater bubble of acrimonious lava risen within her, outrage painting her insides with erupting magma. She could see in his wide-eyed gaze that he’d startled himself with the outburst, that he hadn’t meant to cross this line in the sand. Maria had only ever cultivated a level head to counteract her fiery temper, the one that was right now clawing furiously at the back of her tongue. Tempting as it was to fly into a rage, to pull out her heart and demand,  _ here, is this the proof you wanted to see, _ she shook out her mantle of ice and settled it around her shoulders, held quiet until she’d found her most wintry voice. The office was silent and his apprehension filled every corner: she barely needed to speak above a whisper.

“First of all,” Maria said,  _ “Fuck you. _ You haven’t known me long enough to know how I like my coffee, let alone how I make decisions; and even if you did, what goddamn right do you think you have to judge me? I don’t need to justify myself to you,  _ especially _ not when that logical thinking you seem to hate so much is the only reason I’m still on this case at all. You know where you’d be without me, Rogers? At home, or on your own, because the police would have  _ laughed _ if you had brought this to them. If you don’t like the fact that I consider the  _ consequences _ before I act, or that I’m going to stop and think about a problem instead of barging in like a rhinoceros, then you’re welcome to take this case, shove it up your ass, and leave. There’s the door.”

Maria gestured with one hand, but her eyes never left Steve’s. Somewhere in her speech, she’d stepped close enough that she had to tilt her head back to see his lowered brows and flushed cheeks. She could feel heat in her face, too, brushed there by the adrenaline coursing through her veins. In the stillness, all she could hear was the pulse pounding in her ears and the swift rise and fall of his breath, and the desire to reach out and grab him by the shirt was just overwhelming, if only she could figure out whether it would be to push him out of the room or to drag his mouth down to hers--

“Er--” Maria’s head whipped to find the source of the voice, which turned out to be Bucky Barnes, standing in the open doorway. There were evidently still flames in her eyes, because he quickly raised his hands in self-defense. “It’s fine! I can come back!”

Her eyes slid down to her slowly uncurling hands: her fingernails had left red half-moons in her white palms. “No,” she said, her voice shockingly steady. “That’s fine; I was just going to get a coffee refill. Would you like some?” Bucky shook his head, eyes still wide, and she fled to her office, grateful for the drawn shades as she pushed her eyes into her hands until sparks flew in the dark of her eyelids. It was cool, silent, and in a few minutes, the quiet began to douse the wildfire that raged inside her. She couldn’t sort through the snarl of anger and antagonism and attraction at the moment, not when there was still a whole day of working with Steve ahead of her; the simplest solution was to dump the whole mess in a box labelled “DON’T THINK ABOUT IT” until further notice. This process was interrupted, however, when she heard the click of the door. Without opening her eyes, Maria groaned, “Steve, come on, haven’t we said enough?”

“I’ll say,” he said, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh when she realized that the voice belonged to Bucky. 

“Oh god,” she said as he crossed the room and came to lean on the desk next to her. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough,” he said drily. “Hey,” he added, laughing as she groaned again into her hands, “I’ve been there. That man is hands down the biggest headache I’ve ever had.  _ Ever.” _

Maria cast him a sidelong look between her fingers. “You’re still here,” she pointed out. “He must not be  _ that  _ bad. Maybe it’s just me.”

Bucky smirked. “Oh, it’s not just you. Steve always dates the same type of person: logical, capable, hot as hell--” here he gestured indicatively between the two of them until Maria snorted-- “and mad at him at least twenty percent of the time.”

Maria cleared her throat. “Steve and I aren’t involved,” she mumbled, looking away like a shy high schooler when Bucky looked at her in disbelief.

“If you’re trying to tell me that what I walked in on was just a regular old disagreement, then you’re full of shit,” he said with a blunt laugh. “You were ten seconds from jumping on each other--”

“We were  _ not,” _ Maria said, face blazing as it only did when she was lying.

“Whatever you say,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “All I’m saying is that, if you’re even  _ entertaining _ the thought of getting involved with him, you have to to know that he’s not going to change. He just keeps doing what he does until he wears you down and you either give in or get out. Steve’s a great guy, but man, he makes the Great Wall seem flexible.”

Maria curled her lips into a smirk and sniffed. “Yeah, well I’m stubborn, too,” she informed Bucky, “And I’m not going to let him run wild over my investigation, not when there’s so much at stake. He doesn’t have to change, but he  _ will _ have to compromise if he wants to stay involved in the investigation.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Bucky said with a skeptical shrug. “I tried, god knows Peggy tried: he’s just impossible to change.”

_ We’ll see about that, _ Maria thought as she smiled and thanked Bucky for the advice. After refilling her coffee mug, she and Bucky returned to the conference room, where Steve was poring over the map, tapping the table in an anxiously arhythmic pattern. He looked up when they entered, and Maria wondered if the apology in his gaze was for his words or just her reaction. Aloud, she announced, “Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, let’s just forget--” Steve raised one suggestive, skeptical brow and she swallowed hard, remembering the crackling heat of electric tension that had ricocheted between them: she wouldn’t be forgetting it, and neither would he. Clearing her throat, she tried again: “Let’s just start over. Bucky, what’d you bring us?”

With a cocky grin, Bucky stepped up to the map. “I’ve been doing a lot of eavesdropping lately, especially in Hydra territory. The Tesseract is in Staten Island, so you were both wrong,” he said, not a little bit smug as he circled the borough in pink highlighter. Steve caught Maria’s attention and rolled his eyes, making her smile a little in spite of herself. “Easy access to Jersey, sufficiently isolated since literally everyone avoids Staten Island if they can. Rumor has it that Schmidt keeps it in his sight at all times, even sleeps with it under his pillow.”

“That sounds uncomfortable,” Maria remarked, looking critically at the map once more. “But we have to nail down Hydra’s actual headquarters before we can move on that.” Her mind raced along the tangled threads of this investigation, working to sort them into something more manageable. They needed more comprehensive data: location, hours of high and low activity, concrete numbers of men and assets. They needed a plan for infiltrating the warehouse, plus contingencies for any of the million things that could go wrong; after that, there was still the process of safely extricating Bucky from the Red Room’s grasp. She waved for the other two to continue their conversation as she hunted down a whiteboard marker under Steve’s jacket and started compiling and organizing tasks on the conference room board. Strategizing was even more calming than her office: here was a problem that she could  _ solve, _ something that wasn’t going to set its mouth and fight her every step of the way. The conversation faded to white noise behind her as she wrote, erased, wrote again with more definitive strokes. Arrows curved around bulleted lists and starred notes until a plan finally took shape amidst the scribbles.

“Step one is surveillance,” Maria explained, taking small pride in the faint awe in Steve and Bucky’s eyes as they took in her wall of strategy. “Neither of you should be anywhere near their compound, so I’ll be doing this part. Barnes, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to a man on the inside, so I need you to get whatever you can. I’m sure Ivan has some ties with Hydra, so try to find out what those are, as well as any other allies they have. The more info you bring me, the better.” She turned to Steve. “Rogers, you’re tracking down your old friends from Hydra. We didn’t get much from the police, so you need to fill in all the cracks. I want to know absolutely everything on Schmidt and his cronies before we start making serious moves. Questions?”

Bucky snapped off a salute that was almost serious and Steve for once didn’t argue, so Maria dismissed them to begin their week of investigation in earnest. Bucky managed to check in at least once a day with new chatter from the streets, while Steve trawled the internet and ran down information scattered amongst Brooklyn’s many government buildings. In the meantime, Maria enlisted Kate Bishop to help her surveil the boundaries of Hydra’s territory. Back when Natasha and Clint had worked together to uncover a tech theft at Stark Industries, Kate had rode a desk at SHIELD as their off-site researcher, and nobody was more surprised than Maria to discover that she actually kind of liked the kid. Though she had no filter to speak of and could at times be the worst combination of prissy and obnoxious, Kate was usually good company: clever, bright, and endearingly cynical as only 22 year olds could be. All one had to do to blend into the crowd on Staten Island was speak loudly and pretend to be searching for the terrifying but inexplicably beloved clown that roamed the streets, and Kate pulled it off impeccably, squawking excitedly about it any time someone looked at them twice.

Considering the fact that they were casing the docks of Staten Island instead of avidly searching for a clown, it was fairly easy to avoid finding him. Instead, they scoured the piers of Mariners Harbor, Port Richmond, Old Place, Stapleton, and St. George, returning to SHIELD each evening to press color-coded thumbtacks into the map on the wall. The conference room now more closely resembled a network television police department, especially when, as was the case on the Friday of that week, Maria’s little team stood staring at the map, hands on hips and lips pursed in thought. Steve had dragged yarn lines between Hydra cells and the information he and Bucky had amassed over the week, creating a web that was, surprisingly enough, starting to make some sense. 

“The Mariners Harbor warehouse is clearly their headquarters,” Maria mused, “And as far as I can tell, Schmidt basically lives there. We never saw him arrive on any shift schedule the way Strucker and Zemo do, and the only address he has listed is all the way up in Greenpoint. If he was living there, he’d spend all his time commuting.”

“Which doesn’t rule out the possibility that he has other, unlisted addresses,” Steve pointed out, but it was an addition to the conversation rather than an argument. It had taken the better part of the week for them to settle down and stop vacillating between heated exchanges and cold shoulders whenever they ran into each other at the office. Perhaps Maria was resigning herself to the truth of Steve’s unchangeable nature, or maybe (and she tried not to admit how much this possibility stung) their orbits had just never been meant to overlap for long. Either way, Kate and Bucky no longer tried to dissolve into the walls when they had strategy sessions, which was a decidedly good development. 

“Very true,” Maria agreed. “The best time to snatch the Tesseract might be while Schmidt is sleeping, so we’ll need to stake out headquarters to make sure he’s actually there. I’ll go tonight and--”

“No!” Natasha materialized in the doorway, pointing an accusatory finger. “Maria, get your ass away from that board. It is Friday afternoon, and tonight is the Gala, and  _ you are not getting out of it.” _

“But,” Maria protested, gesturing in vain to the spiderwebs of yarn and mug shots overlaid across the city and ignoring the shit-eating grins on both Steve and Kate’s faces. “I can’t leave now! Things are  _ happening, _ Nat, and I can’t--”

Natasha barely spared a glance at the board. “You  _ can, _ and you will. One night away from your investigation won’t send the world spinning off its axis. Make Kate do the stakeout.”

“Happy to!” Kate chirped.

“You’re not helping,” Maria told the girl, but she merely grinned, so serene that Maria was half-convinced this had all been arranged ahead of time. There was no change to Natasha’s expectant expression and Maria sighed. “Fine, okay, give me a minute.  _ One _ minute,” she insisted when Natasha hesitated, skeptical, before crossing to her office to watch the conference room like a hawk. 

“You never mentioned that Ivan’s favorite missing Black Widow works here,” Bucky said mildly, though his normally cheerful eyes were serious. “He’s got a picture on his desk, but her hair’s much shorter now.”

“It’s need to know information,” Maria said sharply, casting a surprised look at Steve. She’d assumed he’d told his friend, but he shrugged defensively, as if to say,  _ I can keep a secret. _ “Natasha has built a successful life since leaving the Red Room, so I trust that you will be able to keep this to yourself.”

“Cross my heart,” Bucky promised. “I’m not about to put someone into the same hell I’m trying to get out of.”

“Good.” Maria nodded and granted him a grateful smile. She could feel Natasha’s stare boring holes into her back and knew it was only a matter of time before the redhead came back in to drag her out by the collar. “Okay. I have to run, so Kate, the stakeout’s yours if you want it; otherwise, I’ll do it tomorrow night and we’ll all get back to work on Monday morning.” As they milled around trying to organize paperwork into folders and make the conference room look less like a tornado site, Steve found his way to her side, his hand brushing her elbow.

“This is amazing,” he said, subtly gesturing to the mess that signified the progress they’d made. “You’re great at this, and I just really appreciate l that you were willing to stay on the case even though I’ve just been fucking things up since the beginning. I--”

_ “Maria,” _ Natasha hissed from the doorway, either unaware or uncaring of the fact that she was interrupting a possible reconciliation.

“Sorry,” Steve said, head dipping so that he had to look through his long eyelashes at her. “I know you have to go. I hope you have a good time tonight, and if you want to get away from the crowd for a bit, you should check out their collection of 1930s abstract art. I find it surprisingly relaxing.”

Maria managed a crooked smile and it was only when he smiled shyly back that she realized it’d been a week since they’d leaned into each other under the clear starry night, a whole week since they’d smiled at each other at all. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said quietly, touching his hand in parting, then whirled out the door before either one of them could ruin the moment.

 

Growing up on 5th Avenue, Maria had always loved the bold curve of the Guggenheim Museum, its rounded facade so different from the apartment and office buildings that surrounded it. Tonight, the museum was brightly illuminated, every color of the rainbow scrolling across the building’s concrete exterior as Maria followed Natasha and Clint out of the limo Fury had rented for them and into the museum’s foyer, where they traded their wraps and jackets for champagne glasses before moving into the atrium.

She’d been to the Guggenheim countless times--its proximity to her private high school had made it the perfect place to skip her biology lecture--but never at night, never when it was filled with beautiful people swishing around in expensive clothes. Clint had Natasha on one arm and Maria on the other, and she resisted the nervous urge to tug at her sweetheart neckline or poke at her upswept hair. Draining her champagne glass helped soothe her nerves, enough so that when the string quartet started playing, she shooed the other two onto the dance floor and found a spot against the wall where she could watch the crowd. Much of the city’s well-to-do were in attendance: Maria recognized the mayor in conversation with congressional representative, and even spotted a few celebrities mixed in amongst the regular partygoers. She’d always been a people-watcher, making crowded events like these a form of entertainment, and her little niche was peaceful enough that she thought the night might not turn out so bad after all. Of course, it was then that she noted Tony Stark steering Pepper through the dancers in a beeline for Clint and Natasha, who were so busy being disgustingly cute that they didn’t notice until it was too late to move away.  _ Help! _ Natasha mouthed in her direction, and Maria was preparing to move in when Natasha’s gaze shifted over and froze, eyes wide in obvious consternation.

Turning to find what or whoever had shaken her friend, Maria found she had a shadow: a man slightly taller than she, with black hair greying at the temples and cold blue eyes over an angular nose and a censorious frown. He was dressed in the uniform of the New York City Police Commissioner, five gold stars marching up each shoulder of his crisp navy uniform and a slab of decorations and medals over the badge on his left breast pocket. Maria felt her hands clamp around the empty champagne glass that she desperately wished was full. “Hi, Dad.”

After all these years, it shouldn’t have hurt to see him respond with a dissatisfied sigh and an even deeper frown; but how could it not when her presence alone had always been enough to ruin his day? “Maria,  _ must _ we do this every time? I’m your superior officer: you should address me as ‘Sir,’ especially in public.”

“I don’t work for you anymore,  _ Dad,” _ she replied, meeting his eyes in defiance. No matter how hard she tried, conversations with her father always caused her to revert to her teenaged self: petulant, frosty, and antagonistic. “I haven’t been a cop in years; or are you still pretending that I’m on vacation?”

Her father performed his favorite sound effect, an aristocratic, disapproving snort. “I’m sure you’ll soon come to your senses about that charade of a job. Playing Nancy Drew with that bastard Nick Fury and your little hoodlum friend who, by all rights, should be in  _ jail-- _ ”

“Don’t you  _ dare,” _ Maria hissed. “Do not  _ ever _ speak of Nick Fury  _ or _ Natasha in my presence, unless you’d like it to come to light that you covered up the fact that your  _ perfect _ daughter committed grand theft auto at the tender age of 15.” She coolly returned his hostile gaze, calling upon her adolescence spent stomping down on her temper. Many seconds passed as she watched the flush rise and fall in the face so similar to her own, until he at last sniffed and returned to his usual supercilious expression. Maria plucked a fresh glass of champagne off a passing waiter’s tray and drained half of it before asking, “Now, what do you want? I’m sure you didn’t come over here just for this pleasant conversation.”

He frowned at her glass and she raised an eyebrow, daring him to comment. “Your name was on the invitation list,” he said stiffly. “People would talk if we weren’t seen in conversation at some point. I decided to get it over with.” He paused and cast a critical eye over her dress, then added, “I wish you hadn’t worn purple. It’s a terrible color on you.”

This was only partially true. Despite her initial misgivings, by the time Natasha had drawn up the zipper in the back, Maria had known the dress had been the right choice. The eggplant shade of the bodice darkened her cornflower blue to eyes indigo, and when she moved, the deceptively billowing skirt twinkled with streams of tiny sequins sewn into the folds. It felt like she’d borrowed the night sky for her own personal use, like she was glorious, powerful,  _ magnificent; _ but of course he wouldn’t see that, because violet had been her mother’s favorite color, the color they’d buried her in three days after Maria was born, and Maria knew she looked enough like her mother to remind him, every time he saw her, of the happiness she’d taken from him just by being born.

Not that that was any excuse to be a dick to his own child. “Great,” she said, “Thanks for your unwanted, unnecessary input. Anything else?”

He shushed her, characteristically brusque, and Maria rolled her eyes, preparing to leave; but then his hand tightly gripped her arm as they both heard the horrifically cheerful emcee announce that Commissioner Hill was here for a few remarks, and oh, what a  _ wonderful _ surprise, it appeared that his daughter had joined him this evening, too!

After a childhood of being thrust into the spotlight, towed along as a constant bid for sympathy, it was a comfort to see that, from his panicked expression, he clearly hadn’t planned this. Only a small comfort, though, because he hissed, “Well, come on then, and would it hurt to smile for once in your life?” and Maria saw that there was no way out of this short of making a public scene. She turned away from the sympathy in Natasha’s eyes and plastered on a smile as phony as her father’s as the crowds parted for them on their way to the little stage, applauding and cooing at the familial picture they created. In front of an audience Commissioner Richard Hill had only smiles for his daughter, courteously tucking her hand into his elbow as if they regularly strolled together through Central Park.

_ It’s only for a few minutes, _ Maria told herself, tilting her head down in a show of shyness as they ascended the steps and her father crossed to the microphone.  _ Just stand here, keep your mouth shut, and then you’ll be free.  _ This was the millionth time, at least, that she’d found those words winding through her brain, because it was her mantra each and every time she’d misbehaved and been subsequently called into his office for punishment. It had never done any good to argue that he wasn’t being fair, that she was just a kid and not one of his officers, that--well, not to sound like a dramatic teenager, but she’d never asked to be born. In time, she’d learned to become cold, immovable, deaf to the various aspersions he regularly cast upon her. In time, the same words overrode her temper:  _ It’s only for a few minutes; just stand here, keep your mouth shut, and then you’ll be free. _

The Guggenheim was nicer than his office, and, aside from simply existing, Maria hadn’t actually done anything wrong, so she smiled pleasantly and zoned out. As her father droned on about  _ honor _ and  _ family _ and  _ the privilege of serving, _ she scoured the crowd for Clint and Natasha, finding them back across the room near her now-reclaimed niche in the wall. Even from a distance, Maria could see blatant apprehension on her friend’s face.  _ I’m okay, _ she wanted to call over her father’s speech, but she settled for the most reassuring smile she could muster. Letting the speech fade to white noise, she scanned over the rest of the gala’s attendees, hoping against hope that nobody else she knew was there; but by the time her father began to slow down, she knew she’d been spotted by more than a few old acquaintances from the force.

Even worse, as her father relinquished the microphone to the Broadway actress who was chairing the gala, Maria spotted someone in the crowd that nearly caused her to trip down the stairs: Steve Rogers, his golden hair a beacon in the crowd, staring at her in complete revelation.

 

By the time Maria extracted herself from the crushing crowd, the only thing she wanted was solitude. She’d lost track of Natasha and couldn’t quite dredge up the impulse to search for her and Clint: they’d be enjoying the evening, and she didn’t want her gloom to ruin their date. Instead, she slipped away and made her way up the wide corkscrew of the Guggenheim atrium until she reached the top level. A lively band had replaced the gentle string quartet from before, but the spirited saxophone barely crested the seventh floor balcony where Maria took a moment to lean and watch the tiny people below swarm to the bar and the dance floor.

She knew she should be down there, too, laughing with Nat and dancing with Clint and pretending that her father hadn’t just swung a wrecking ball into her mood, but she hadn’t seen her father in a few years and that meant she’d lost her tolerance for his particular brand of malevolence. Every time she saw him, she thought she was immune--after all, he’d been the one to teach her how to be frozen, who’d cut her icy edges into sharp planes; and yet each time she was left struggling to find that cold demeanor that came so easily around anyone else.  _ Next time, _ she swore to the ant-sized people below,  _ Next time I’ll tell him to fuck off before he can hurt me. _

With this vow, she set off to tour the gallery that occupied the top floor of the museum as a distraction before beginning her descent back to the party. Maria had always liked simple, clean lines and bright colors, but the meaning of modern art had always eluded her, and tonight was no different. Kandinsky’s  _ Decisive Rose, _ for example, made no sense: she appreciated the pale yellow background and the crisply formed black shapes upon it, but the only thing even remotely rose-like was a seemingly random pink square.

The elevator dinged behind her and Maria wondered how long she had to look thoughtfully at the painting before it was acceptable to give up and move on. As she stood and considered, hoping she looked appropriately intrigued by modern art, whoever was in the elevator walked over and joined her at the canvas. “I see you took my suggestion,” they said, and Maria turned to find Steve, pleasant surprise curving his mouth into a smile and making his eyes shine. Up close, she could see that his tuxedo was cut perfectly, the jacket tucked in close at the waist but leaving plenty of room for his powerful shoulders to move. She remembered the way those muscles felt, bunching under her hands as he’d lifted her by the waist and kissed her against the wall in the moonlight. She looked at his lips; she blushed.

“I--I didn’t really,” she confessed, jerking her attention back to the painting. “I don’t really understand abstract art. It  _ is _ relaxing, though,” she added, sliding a sly glance at him from the corners of her eyes. “And I like the colors.” They stood together in silence, continuing to search for the elusive rose, and then Maria casually tossed out, “You didn’t mention you’d be here this evening.”

Steve grinned. “Have I ever told you how impressive it is that you can turn a statement into ten questions?” he asked. Maria pinned him with a glare, half-amused, and he assented. “Okay, fine, a friend asked me to come at the last minute. I would have texted you but I… I thought you wouldn’t want to know. I didn’t want to ruin your night.”

She snuck another glance and found him staring intently at the painting, studying it with more care than strictly necessary. In this empty gallery, with the gentle lights filtering between their shoulders, it felt cowardly to lie. “No,” she agreed, voice soft. “I wouldn’t have.” 

After a long pause, in which his upright posture slipped a fraction of an inch, he put his hands in his pockets and nodded as if accepting a foregone conclusion. “So I’ll go, then,” he said, immediately acting on this offer by beginning to turn away. “You look incredible, by the way,” he added in afterthought, a rueful smile playing on his lips before he ducked his head and strode to the elevator. “Like midnight. Enjoy the exhibit.”

“Wait.” They were reconciling, right? If she just put her hand on his arm and pulled him back, they could stroll together through the museum, and he could talk to her about art theory, and they could be friends again. It wasn’t that things were easier when they were friends, because they weren’t; but being around Steve made her feel warm, like she was filled up with sunshine. “You can stay, if you want,” she offered, each word a timber laid across the chasm, rebuilding the bridge between them. He hesitated, turned away from the elevator door, and she confided, “I don’t know very much about art. Anything, really. I’d like to know more, though, if you want to tell me.” She let the invitation hang in the air, an olive branch, and she could see that he was going to try to accept it by apologizing. “Don’t,” she said, waving him off, “We don’t need to do all that. Let’s just--let’s just take the Steve Rogers Guggenheim tour, okay?”

Steve nodded in that self-deprecating way of his, a matching grin tugging at his lips. “Alright,” he said, placing her hand on his elbow and guiding her around to the next painting, “Though I warn you, it’s going to be  _ very _ boring.” It wasn’t, though, because Steve was so passionate about art that it positively shone out of him, joy emanating out of every pore. He was even more enthusiastic when she asked questions or commented on the similarities between Klee and Picasso, hands flying and smile growing wider and wider. At Delauney’s  _ Circular Forms, _ he pulled his sketchbook from his jacket and showed her a sketch it had inspired--not even trying to hide the doodle of her face on the opposite page. 

Maria didn’t mind. It was nice to let art lead their conversation a hundred different directions, to meander down the swirling atrium ramp, to completely lose track of time in their exploration of the museum. It could have been minutes or hours or even days and Maria wouldn’t have regretted a single second of it. They laughed loudly in empty galleries, critiqued sculptures in terrible accents, and Steve would occasionally catch the melody of whatever the band was playing and spin Maria into a dance unlike any ballroom pattern she’d ever learned.

“Steve?” In the midst of the latest spurt of dancing, a woman’s refined British voice curled around the corner to the gallery currently being used as their dance hall. “Are you in here?” The voice was quickly followed by its owner, a woman in a structured crimson dress whose thick brown hair was looped up in vintage victory rolls and whose expressive brown eyes flashed with intelligence as she immediately took stock of the scene. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt!”

“Peggy!” Steve promptly let go of Maria and crossed the gallery, leaving her face red and her hands at odd ends as he kissed the other woman’s cheek. “Peg, this is Maria; you know, from the investigation?”

“Ah,” Peggy said, and paired the sound with a significant glance at Steve.  _ “Maria. _ How lovely to finally meet you. Steve speaks of you and your investigation every time I get him on the phone.” Which, apparently, was often, based on the ensuing conversation. Though Steve shared that Peggy’s thin wedding band connected her to Angie Martinelli, the Broadway actress Maria had briefly met on the gala stage, it was clear that he and Peggy still deeply loved each other. More than the fact that he had a special fondness in his eyes or the way they leaned upon each other so comfortably, Maria was envious of the trust obvious in their every interaction. Their own relationship was so wrought with tension, so full of mistrust and betrayal, that she doubted they’d ever reach this kind of relaxed coexistence.

_ And why should you? _ she challenged herself.  _ You’re just friends. _ Steve and Peggy had dated at some point: of course there was a certainty in the way they looped their arms together.  _ If all you want is to be friends, then you shouldn’t be jealous.  _

But she was. “I just realized I’ve completely abandoned my friends,” Maria said in apology, scooping up her skirts and swirling for the ramp. “I’m sorry, but I should find them. Steve, I’ll see you tomorrow; Peggy, it was wonderful to meet you.” But it wasn’t, it hadn’t been, because seeing Steve look at someone with such entire happiness had forced her to recognize that it was something she wanted when he looked at her, and something which she was never going to have.


	8. Chapter 8

The last thing Maria needed was to obsess about the realization that she was half in love with Steve, and fortunately, Kate’s stakeout debrief the next day provided the perfect distraction.

“He lives there,” she proclaimed Sunday morning as she, Maria, and Steve yawned their way though her recap of the night spent on a rooftop neighboring the Hydra compound. “Never left the compound. I used your databases here to check some public security footage in the area and Schmidt appears to stay in the warehouse for weeks at a time. If we want the Tesseract, we’re going to have to go in.”

This was exactly the news Maria had hoped to avoid. Involving cops had long ago been ruled out, as doing would almost certainly implicate Bucky in his participation in illicit Red Room activities. Unfortunately, that meant the only footsoldiers Maria had at her disposal were her little ragtag team, none of whom she was keen on sending into a Hydra facility. What was  _ extra _ unfortunate was that Steve wasn’t dumb and surely could identify this as a moment for him to do something characteristically dangerous.

“So how do we get in, then?” Maria mused with a sigh, examining the map they’d pieced together of the warehouse and surrounding fenced-in area. The lot was large and the fence was heavily patrolled, making it nigh impossible to sneak in. The single driveway featured a security checkpoint which required all occupants to exit the vehicle while it was thoroughly searched, eliminating that possibility. Even Kate’s suggestion to rise from the sewers was rejected: there were few convenient access or exit points, and besides, that only worked in the movies.

They spent the next few days trying to come up with a more viable option, but the investigation had ground to a halt. There was simply no realistic way to smuggle the four of them, or even just  _ one _ of them, onto the property, no matter what angle they tried. By Wednesday afternoon, they were reduced to tossing increasingly ludicrous scenarios at each other for lack of plausible solutions: Kate suggested building a portal and Maria lobbied for teleportation while Steve argued the merits of a WWII Sherman tank plowing through the entire structure. 

This wholly useless conversation was interrupted when Bucky came in, stomping snow off his boots. His scarlet track suit made him appropriately festive for the first weekend in December, especially with the snow still melting into his hair. Steve’s grin widened, as it always did when he saw his oldest friend, and Maria again shoved away a pang of jealousy.  _ Get ahold of yourself, _ she admonished herself, turning her attention away from Steve as Bucky dropped into a chair and accepted a cup of coffee from Kate. 

“I’ve got a way in,” he said, the hesitation in his voice not matching the thrill in his eyes. “But you’re not going to like it.” He delivered this last part to Maria, who didn’t like it at all: Hydra, looking to expand their empire, had used their ties to the Maggia crime family to engineer a meeting with the Red Room. Ivan, always looking for a way to increase the number of people and businesses he could extort, racketeer, or steal from, had agreed, and chosen Bucky’s squadron to accompany him to the Hydra compound. The meeting was Friday night.

“You said I was the man on the inside,” Bucky argued as Maria pinched the bridge of her nose. “This is our best chance; hell, this is our  _ only _ chance! Is there  _ any _ other way for one of us to get inside?”

The silence that fell made it clear that they all knew the truth: if they wanted the Tesseract out of Hydra’s hands, Bucky was going to have to walk straight into the lion’s den. He was the only one who seemed enthused by this: Kate bit her lip and Steve’s jaw twitched. Maria covered her eyes, hoping that if she didn’t look at the truth in front of her, she didn’t have to accept it. Bucky going in was the best opportunity they’d had yet, but the risks pinballed around her stomach. Maria liked order, structure,  _ control _ , especially when a friend’s safety was on the line, and this scenario provided none of that.

_ But what other choice do you have? _ “The meet is Friday?” Maria asked at last, regret already plummeting through her veins. At Bucky’s wary nod, she stood and strode to the whiteboard, turning back with an expectant expression on her face. “Then we don’t have much time to make plans. Tell me everything you know.”

“Everything” turned out to be frustratingly little. The Red Room contingent would meet at the Hydra complex on Friday at midnight. Ivan would be meeting directly with Schmidt, but it was unknown for how long, or if any products would be changing hands, or how many Hydra operatives would be supervising. For his own part, Ivan had an array of delicately balanced teams, perfectly grouped for various types of crime. Bucky’s unit, comprised mainly of bruisers and brawlers, had been chosen over one of the stealthier or more multi-talented groups, like the Black Widow squad Natasha had recently run afoul of. What wasn’t clear was whether Ivan expected Hydra to start a fight or if he planned to start one himself.

“What, exactly, is your plan, then?” Kate made no attempt to disguise her skepticism at the distinct lack of information. “Use your Jedi mind powers to summon the cube to you?”

Bucky gave the unbothered shrug of someone wholly confident in himself. “I’m sure Red Skull wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring the Tesseract to a meeting with a gang of pickpockets. I’ll say I have to use the john, duck the guards, and search his room.”

“You don’t even know where his room is,” Steve quietly pointed out. He was sat back in his chair, crossed arms straining the sleeves of his t-shirt and agitation in every sharp intake of breath. “You can’t do this, Buck, it’s too dangerous. Too many things could go wrong.”

Bucky stood, slamming his hand on the conference table. “You know, it’s funny, Steve,” he said, despite the noticeable lack of humor in his face, “I used to say things like that to you all the time, and you’d just pat me on the shoulder and tell me everything would be okay. Not so fun to be the one worrying now, is it?” He turned from Steve’s glower to Maria and Kate, both taken aback, and his tone softened. “I know it’s not ideal, but if there’s even a _ chance _ of this working--Look, Maria, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking all this on, okay? I know this isn’t your style, and I won’t be mad if you decide not to help; but this might be my only shot, and I can’t just throw it away. I’m going to that meeting.” He moved towards the door as he spoke, pausing only to clap Steve pointedly on the shoulder and say, “Everything is going to be okay, pal.”

“He can’t do this,” Steve ventured, his voice loud in the vacuum that Bucky had left in his wake. Maria had never seen him so-- _ scared _ was the only word for it. “We have to stop him, Maria, he’s going to get himself killed, he’s--”

Maria shooed Kate from the room before crossing to where Steve sat, hands gripped so tightly together that they were losing color. His bright eyes seemed huge in his pale face and, as she carefully settled her hands over his, she could feel a delicate tension hovering under his skin. “He’ll be fine,” she said as kindly as she knew how. “Bucky is a smart guy, and clever, too. Even if they catch him, nobody will know he’s working with us, right? Hydra will be annoyed that he was snooping around, and Ivan will be annoyed that he got caught, but all that means is he’ll get assigned some extra graveyard shifts with the gang.” 

Steve didn’t look particularly convinced, but he unclenched his hands, twisting his wrists until his fingers wove between hers. For once, his hands weren’t covered in leftover charcoal, but Maria found she kind of missed the streaky marks on his hands. “What if something goes wrong?” he asked at last, guilt and resignation and doubt braided together into a heavy sigh.

“We’ll be there,” Maria promised with a squeeze of his hands. “We’ve got 48 hours or so until the meeting: we’ll figure out a way. He won’t be alone.”

Steve looked up, and the fire and resolution in his eyes seemed to come from the deepest part of him, marked with the earnest sincerity that was in everything he did. “If we only have 48 hours,” he said, pulling her to her feet, “Then we don’t have much time. Let’s get to work. And, hey,” he added, his hands still lingering on hers, “thank you.” With one last squeeze of her hands, he went to the door to call Kate back; Maria did her best to brush away the warmth tingling in her palms.

 

Nobody was happy with the plan: there was too little communication with Bucky for Maria to be happy, too little protection of Bucky for Steve to be comfortable, and, in Kate's case, too little involvement.

"You can't leave me here!" she insisted. "I'm not a  _ child, _ you know."

"Well you're certainly acting like one," Maria said, time too short for her to be anything but blunt. "We need someone in the office in case anything goes wrong, and Steve and I are both more experienced in field work than you.  _ Yes, I know you fought the Red Room," _ she added when Kate opened her mouth to object," But if this blows up, we'll be fighting Hydra, too, and I just can't be worrying about you on top of to everything else." Maria wasn't nearly as close to Kate as Clint was, but she understood the affinity: a kid sister who thought she knew best, fearless and brave in a way that was both inspiring and terrifying. If she lost track of Kate in the fight, if she got hurt or captured or--

She'd never forgive herself. "You're staying. That's final." Kate fumed and raged, but when 4 pm rolled around, Maria and Steve climbed into a paneled electrician’s van and headed for Mariners Harbor without her. Dillon Electrics occupied the lot next to the Hydra warehouse, and for a not insubstantial fee, was allowing them to hide in one of their vans and conduct a stakeout on their neighbors; that is, as long as they were inside the parking lot gates before they closed up shop at 5 pm. They slid through the gate at a respectable 4:58, checked in with the front desk, and settled themselves in the van’s empty cargo space for the evening.

In supervising the packing process, Maria had made sure they had all the necessities: fast food and power bars, bottled water, binoculars and climbing equipment and even some thin emergency blankets in case someone wanted to take a nap. What she hadn’t packed was something to occupy the minimum of seven hours that lay between their arrival and the actual meeting. Sure, they’d finally settled into a friendship safely removed from the  _ I want to kill you  _  and  _ I want to kiss you _ extremes they’d been swinging between, but that didn’t mean that Maria had enough conversation in her to last that long. With her phone turned off to save the battery, she took the only dignified course of evasion she could think of. “I think I’ll take a nap,” she announced, rolling her burger wrapper into a ball and tossing it into its paper bag. “You should, too, if you want to have any energy later.”

She wrapped herself up in a blanket without giving him a chance to respond, pillowing her head on a pile of electrical cables and rolling as far away as she could in the narrow space. After a moment, she heard Steve shake out his own blanket and felt the van floor shift as he stretched out next to her.  _ All you have to do now is fall asleep, _ she told herself, but it was easier said than done. Closing her eyes seemed to amplify every sound, especially Steve’s even breathing two feet away, and then she was thinking of Thanksgiving, of how easy it had been to fall asleep against the rise and fall of his chest. 

_ God, Maria, don’t do this to yourself, _ but once the train of thought left the station, it was impossible to stop:  _ are we lying here together, remembering the same night? Or--maybe he’s moved on, or maybe he regrets it, and I’m the only one wishing we were back on that roof. No, _ she interrupted herself, because obviously sleep wasn’t going to happen any time soon,  _ There was the museum; that had to have meant something. So maybe he still thinks about it, too. Maybe we could start over, later, after; or maybe I could just roll over right now and say something, or do something, or-- _

“I know you’re awake,” Steve remarked in the darkness, and Maria froze, her runaway thoughts yanking hard on the emergency brake. While she debated whether or not to say anything, he continued, “Or at least, I’m pretty sure. If you are, can I ask you a question?” He paused and Maria waited, trying to keep her breathing even. “Okay, how about I just ask it, and if you don’t want to answer, you can just keep pretending to be asleep, or really be asleep, I guess. I just… you seemed pretty upset the night of the gala, when you were up on the stage, I mean, and I’ve just been wondering what had happened to make you so sad.”

Of all the things he could have asked, she hadn’t been expecting that. It had never occurred to Maria that anyone other than Natasha had picked up on her discomfort: none of her other acquaintances at the event knew her well enough to pick up on the subtle differences that set her  _ I’m pretending this is fine _ face apart from her regular facial expressions. She had accused Steve of not knowing her very well. Maybe she’d been wrong. 

Softly, sliding the words under his disappointed sigh, she asked, “Did you go up to that gallery just to find me?”

The silence drew on, thickening the air, and then-- “If I say yes, are you going to get mad?”

_ So, yes. _ Maria rolled to her back and propped her head under one arm, staring up at the metal paneling of the van roof and wishing she could see the stars. When she was young, she’d believed that her mother sat on the crescent moon and watched over her, and had thus directed her nightly questions and troubles and wishes skyward in hopes of an answer. The belief hadn’t lasted into adulthood, but the stars in the inky darkness still felt like a familiar blanket that would have made talking easier. “My mom died in childbirth. I don’t think my dad really wanted to have kids, but she did, and then, well, she was gone and he was stuck with this screaming infant he’d never wanted. I mean, yeah, I was taken care of, but he hated my entire existence.  _ Hates, _ I guess,” she amended. “Since he’s still like this after all these years, and, shockingly, blaming your kid for your wife’s death doesn’t do much in terms of relationship building. It was bad enough to run into him, but having to go up on stage with him, too? God.”

After a minute, in which she worried that her bitterness had scared him off, Steve spoke. “I was sick a lot as a kid,” he said. Maria heard a creak as the floor shifted and then his shoulder was brushed up next to hers, a distracting warmth that radiated through her. “I mean, pneumonia, strep, you name it, I had it. My dad lasted three years and then threw in the towel. Didn’t even come back for my mom’s funeral, and definitely not for his pathetic waste of a son.”

“Is the moral of this story that I should be glad I had my dad at all?” Maria asked, her tone flippant even as she cautiously set a comforting hand over his between them.

Steve let out a bark of laughter.  _ “God, _ no. The moral of this story is that dads are assholes, or, at least, ours are. Fuck ‘em both. Also,” he added as Maria snorted and rolled her eyes, “sorry I asked such a nosy question. You can ask me something, if you want, so we’re even.”

_ I want to know everything,  _ she wanted to say, because she was a capital-I Idiot whose previously solid placement on the like-to-love scale was rapidly veering out of control.  _ Tell me your favorite memory, and the song you hate most, and the kind of snacks you get at the movies. Tell me your Hogwarts house. Tell me how you got to be such a bad liar, or how you stay so noble in a world so shitty, or how you knew that violets are my favorite. Tell me your entire history, chronologically or by importance, your choice. Tell me what you believe, what you hold to be most deeply true and sacred. Tell me about Bucky.  _ “Tell me about Peggy,” she blurted out, and oh god, of all the questions, this one most made her want to pull her blanket over her face.  _ Jesus, Maria, could you be more obvious? _

The thunk of Steve’s hand knocking on his chest was followed by a huff of self-deprecating laughter. “You know how to hit a guy where it hurts, Hill,” he said, and in the dark she could only picture the rueful smile that had to be on his face. “Ice cold.”

“You don’t have to answer,” she apologized, mortified. “I’ll ask something else. Sorry.”

“No, no,” he said, a faint stirring in the air indicating that he’d waved her offer away. “Deal’s a deal, and it’s not much of a story, anyway. We met at this conference in Berlin; she was working for some Italian military contractor at the time and I’d just moved to Stuttgart a few months before. We’re all sitting around and some dumbass loudly assumes that she’s just there to serve coffee during the meeting. The way she dismantled that guy--I was in love, instantly. Peggy is just a force of nature, I mean, unstoppable. We were both hot-headed and stubborn and reckless, though, which was great in the beginning and awful by the end. Do you know how hard it is to end an argument when you both want to get the last word in? God, we’d fight for days. In the end we were just too alike, and when she met Angie, it was obvious that they were meant to be together, so we stopped trying to keep a relationship afloat across the Alps and just let things crash into the ice.”

“I’m sorry,” Maria said when he didn’t continue.

She felt another waft of air. “Don’t be,” Steve assured her. “Old news, we’re still friends and now we’re both happier.” She was positive that she imagined his knee nudging hers. “Hey, my watch says we’ve got six hours until showtime; is that enough time for the ‘long story’ of how you once punched an alligator?” It was, and then she followed up the story with questions about Bucky, which led to Natasha’s history with the Red Room, which led to Maria’s time on the police force, which led to Fury; and on and on and on. The darkness and proximity lent intimacy: it was easy to be confessional when they laid side by side, shoulders grazing each time they shook with laughter. To demonstrate his disastrously short tenure as a life drawing model, Steve turned and propped himself up on one arm, and soon Maria had rolled to face him, the breath of their laughter commingling between them. She didn’t know how her hand ended up curled around his bicep. She had no idea when his arm had come to drape familiarly over her waist. She wasn’t sure which one of them had tucked her head under his chin, or whose breath evened into sleep first.

When Steve shook her awake, he was grinning shyly, and Maria tried to bite down on the matching smile that stole across her face. “What time is it?” she yawned, with a stretch that made her realize how entwined they’d become in sleep; Steve made no move to disentangle his legs from hers, though, and she wasn’t going to complain.

“11:53,” he recited from his watch read out. “Showtime.” But they still laid there for a few minutes, anyway, until Bucky texted in code that he was in place and Maria stood on reluctant legs to get herself in order. They folded their blankets, cleaned up the cargo hold, and waited, sitting hip to hip against the side wall. By the time 12:01 flashed up on her watch, tension was leaking out of Steve’s every cell; he clutched her silently offered hand tightly between his own. The minutes ticked by one excruciating second at a time, and they waited.

She’d left the code creation up to Steve and Bucky, so when Steve’s phone buzzed at 12:23 and he held it out for her to read, Maria had no idea was she reading.  _ Buy 3 yellow apples, _ the text said, and she assumed from the way Steve’s entire body snapped to attention that it wasn’t good news.

_ “Fuck,” _ he said, voice hoarse. “He’s caught.” He stared at the message on the screen,  long enough that Maria was almost ready to wave her hand in front of his face. “On the third floor,” he added, “But they don’t know what he was looking for, just that he was snooping around.”

“So he should be okay,” Maria said, trying to inject more confidence than hope into her voice. Steve needed to know that Bucky would make it out (relatively) unscathed, or else he was going to do something drastic, something stupid--

“I’m going in,” Steve said, the exact drastic and stupid thing she was hoping to prevent. She could hear the quick calculations he was making even as he spoke. “I have to. There’s only four stories and he’s cleared three of them, so--”

“So they’ll be on alert,” she pointed out. “So they’ll have more guys down there in case Ivan sends another recruit their way.”

Steve was already opening the van’s back door, inviting the winter air in to steal all the heat they’d collected over the hours. He squinted in the direction of the warehouse next door, then turned his attention up the edifice of Dillon Electrics. “Then I’ll get in through the roof,” he said firmly, zipping his jacket with decisiveness and shoving supplies into his pockets as Maria sat on the bumper and watched. “They don’t have anyone up there, probably because of the cold. I can jump the distance; it’ll be easy. I’ll go in, find the Tesseract, and get out, and then Bucky will be free and he won’t--and he can just live his life again. I think I can do it. What do you think?”

“Steve--”

_ “Maria,” _ he pleaded, “I can’t just _ sit _ here, I can’t. After this, they’ll beef up security here and Ivan will be suspicious of him and he’ll just be in more danger. I have to do this.  _ Please, _ I’m begging you, just let me go.”

The words were all lined up in her throat:  _ it’s too dangerous _ and  _ what if something happens to you _ and  _ why can’t you ever consult someone before barging in, _ the lecture she could practically at this point repeat in her sleep; but just as she opened her mouth to berate him for the umpteenth time, she closed it.  _ What do you think? _ his voice echoed in her ears, and it was a question.  _ I’m begging you, _ and it was a request. He was still standing in front of her, chest heaving as he breathed through the adrenaline, and this was Steve asking for permission, pulling up the reins on his instinct to charge first and apologize later. Of course, he was going to do this either way, but he was  _ asking, _ at least trying to respect her position at the head of this operation, and considering how much he struggled to compromise, it felt like a miracle.

Maria stood, setting her feet solidly on the ground, and crossed her arms. “I can’t let you go,” she said, and the hardening of his face said  _ try and stop me. _ He turned to walk away and she took a shaky breath. “Not without me.”

The grooves of his soles scraped the pavement as he turned and looked at her, stared hard, as if she’d just spoken another language, as if she might not be real.  _ “What?” _

“I’m coming with you,” she repeated, buttoning her jacket with a snappy confidence that contrasted with the voice in the back of her head asking if she’d lost her mind entirely. “You don’t have to do this alone, and you’ll be safer with a lookout, and--”

In two swift steps, Steve closed the distance between them and crushed his mouth to hers, his tongue sliding into her surprised mouth. There was no room to get a word in edgewise: he kissed her so hard she saw nebulas explode behind her eyelids, one hand curling around her neck and the other pushing her bun out of order. Maria could not have cared less, not about her hair or Hydra or anything other than the perfect pressure of his mouth on hers. Her hands slid under his jacket, searching for the warmth of his skin, and she didn’t realize they’d backed into the van until her knees hit the bumper.

“I--” Steve gulped, leaning just far away enough to speak, “I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I--I’ve wanted to do that all night, so I’m not sorry.”

This time, she couldn’t stop herself from grinning, wide and a little dopey. “I’m not sorry, either,” she assured him, though she did definitely regret stepping out of the warm circle of his arms. “But we should probably go kick some ass now. The sooner we can end this, the better.”

“Right,” Steve said, eyes full of an emotion it was too dark to get a clear read on. “That’s what we were doing.” They made quick work of packing up the supplies they needed, and when the van was locked, when the backpack was slung across his shoulders and their caps were tugged low on their foreheads, Steve turned back and tucked one single tender kiss above her ear. “Thank you,” he said, voice uneven with the same unidentified emotion Maria was afraid to give a name to. “You are extraordinary, and I am in your debt.”

Maria turned her face up to his. “I’m sure I’ll figure out something you can do,” she teased softly. “Later. For now, let’s focus on getting out alive.”


	9. Chapter 9

Standing on the roof of the four story Dillon Electrics warehouse, Maria became quite positive that she’d lost all semblance of sanity. In the night, the alleyway that separated the electrical facility from the Hydra stronghold might as well have been a gaping abyss.  _ You could have stayed in the van, _ she chided herself, but one glance at Steve washed the thought away. The van was infinitely safer, but sometimes, when it was important, risks were justified.

_ Great. So Steve learned to compromise and you learned to take both a figurative and soon-to-be literal leap, and now you’re both going to die in a spectacle of idiocy. _ This line of thinking was supremely unhelpful, so Maria stepped over to where Steve stood, binoculars held to his face as he studied their target. “Find anything useful?”

He pointed into the abyss. “We’re lucky this is isn’t built to standard alley proportions,” he said, and of course he’d know what standard alley proportions were,  _ of course. _ “It’s really more of a driveway, so it should be a pretty easy jump if we get a running start.”

“And then?” Maria pushed, trying not to look down. She wasn’t usually afraid of heights, but she also wasn’t usually doing long jumps on rooftops, either. 

“Still working on that,” Steve admitted, “but whatever we’re going to do, we need to hurry. The meeting isn’t going to last forever.” He squinted through the binoculars again. “Fortunately, we only need to search the top floor, which looks deserted. Since Schmidt can’t inconspicuously carry a hard drive the size of a Rubik’s cube, and since Bucky didn’t find it in his room, it must be somewhere on this floor. There’s no alarm on the roof access door, so we can get in that way. There’s not much we can do once we get there besides move fast and hope for the best.”

_ Move fast and hope for the best? We are so dead. _ Aloud, Maria called Kate and quickly sketched out their plan. “If I text you anything other than SAFE, or if you don’t hear from me in, say, an hour, call Nick and the police, in that order,” she finished with a sigh, trying to avoid Steve’s worried gaze as they said their goodbyes and hung up.

“You don’t have to come,” he said, concern looping around his low voice. “I can do this alone and I--you don’t have to turn yourself into some sort of suicidal daredevil just because I’m, you know,  _ evolutionarily deficient.” _

She was anxious, and a little scared, but Maria rolled her eyes anyway. “When I was 15, I used to steal cars,” she informed him. “A lot. And then usually I’d street race them for money. I can and have made plenty of evolutionary deficient choices all on my own. Now,” she said, tossing him an adrenaline-fueled grin as she backed across the tar-papered roof, “let’s do this before I lose my nerve.”

She didn’t wait for Steve to argue, or to give her the okay; Maria took off running, gaining speed across the roof, and then she was flying. The abyss reached up for her feet, but  _ oh, _ the stars and moon hung so low that she could have grabbed them, and even as she tumbled unceremoniously to a stop, exhilaration bloomed like springtime in her chest. Resisting the urge to whoop in triumph might have been her greatest accomplishment of the day.

Steve rolled to a stop next to her a few seconds later, and she knew she was grinning like a lunatic as she pulled him to his feet. “Are you  _ crazy?” _ he hissed, cracking a reluctant smile when she flashed him her most derisive glare. “Fine, okay, I’m full of shit; but still! I was under the impression that you were going to be the responsible one here.”

Maria smirked. Her job certainly required adventurousness and audacity, but nothing like this, nothing that brought back the old heady intoxication of doing something she absolutely shouldn’t. “Now you know how I feel,” she said with feeling. “Ready?”

In response, Steve strode to the roof access door, checking it thoroughly before deeming it safe to try the lock. To both of their great surprise, it was unlocked. “Looks like they’ve gotten a little too comfortable,” Steve commented, easing the door open to ensure there wasn’t a nasty surprise waiting for them. The stairs were unlit, making each of their steps wary as they descended into the murky dark. There was another door at the foot of the stairwell, the real point of no return. Maria had let Steve lead the way, but here he hesitated, looking back at her. He drew a deep breath and Maria prepared herself for some flavor of a patronizing  _ be careful _ speech, but then he exhaled, brushed a gentle thumb over her cheek, and turned the knob.

A sea of metal shelves stretched forth into the dark, lit only by the moonlight falling through the high windows along one wall. Some were empty, but most held an assortment of boxes and spare parts. The room was long, almost the complete length of the warehouse, and open to the wooden rafters above. Just as Maria began to fear that they’d have to search each shelf individually, which would take time that they definitely did not have, Steve silently pointed to a pair of doors just barely outlined in the dark. One’s bright exit sign announced it to be a stairwell, while a bluish light emanating through the other door’s glass panel suggested a computer inside.

It was a good a place to start as any. Through gestures and pointing, Maria suggested they stay together against the wall with the windows, figuring this would make them less likely to be caught in the light it let in. Steve nodded and they set off, taking short steps and long pauses to avoid making noise. At the first row of shelves, Maria drew up, thinking a precarious arrangement of supplies was a Hydra envoy. Three rows later, Steve nearly tripped over a misplaced crate of ammunition. They moved more and more slowly, at an excruciating pace that made Maria long for a SWAT team and an opportunity to run in guns blazing instead of picking her way across a concrete floor doing its best to make her rubber soles squeal. It was a terrible idea to let her mind wander in a time like this, so she did her best to suppress the fantasy of storming in, demanding Schmidt hand over the Tesseract, and simply going home to her warm, soft bed.

In reality, they finally reached the last row of shelves, and Steve signalled Maria to stand back from the pool of watery light in front of the office door while they briefly sorted out what to do. The stairs, they both agreed, were too dangerous to touch: any sound would surely reverberate down to the lower levels and alert a whole host of goons to their presence. The office appeared deserted and without any sort of alarm system; they’d pick any lock they encountered, search the room, and hopefully find what they needed without incident. The solemn nods they exchanged felt awfully final, and Maria’s hand impulsively shot out to hold Steve’s for a second. He smiled, surprised and gratified and reassuring, and she mentally tucked a picture of it into a pocket of her heart before he nodded again and moved to the door.

The door was unlocked, another indication that Hydra’s security left much to be desired, and Steve opened it so slowly that Maria expected a squadron of Hydra hoods to come bursting out of the stairwell and catch them red-handed; but finally it was open enough for him to squeeze through and Maria followed, carefully closing the door behind her. Though they’d yet to run into anyone, it would have been pure foolishness to turn lights on and alert the compound to their presence, so they continued to depend on the blue-skyed generic landscape background on the computer to light their way. Though not evident from outside, the office was actually split into two rooms, with a wall and door separating the two. The front section that Maria and Steve stood in was large but spartan, featuring only the computer, its minimalist desk, some partially assembled shelves, and a chair. Making an assumption about the depth of the stairwell on the other side of the wall, Maria guessed the back room couldn’t be much larger than a closet.

“Seems like the perfect place to hide something,” she whispered, lifting a shoulder towards the second door. Steve thoroughly inspected the computer desk before nodding, thoughtful. They moved purposefully together to the door, only to find that this one was locked. Steve looked around, clearly searching for something to hit it with, but Maria pulled off her cap and yanked a few bobby pins out of her bun. “I got this,” she muttered around a mouthful of pins. The first time she’d ever caught Natasha and thrown her in the backseat, the slippery thief had been out of both her cuffs and the squad car by the second stoplight. Once Nat had joined SHIELD, she’d insisted on sharing some of her extensive lockpicking knowledge with Maria, even going so far as to buy her a nice set of lockpicks as a Christmas gift. They’d come in handy more times than Maria had expected, but this was a simple lock, and a pair of pins and a minute were all she needed to pop it open.

Unlike the front part of the office, this room had no windows; Maria blindly searched the wall for a light switch once Steve had closed the door firmly behind them. When she at last found the light, the room was immediately doused in ugly fluorescent light, revealing another computer station; and there, right in front of them, was the Tesseract--

In the hands of Arnim Zola. “Hello there,” he said, genial and calm. The light glinted off his Ralphie Parker glasses, casting his eyes into shadows and dropping an eerie reflection over his round, pudgy face. Unlike the Hydra thugs Maria had previously scoped out, Zola was dressed neatly, his suit clean if creased from a day of wear. His scant hair laid in place, his tie hung perfectly straight, and he overall possessed a total composure that creeped Maria out. What normal person sat in complete darkness in an office in the middle of the night? Furthermore, why, when interrupted from this bizarre choice of activity, was his only question, “Shouldn’t you be wearing red jackets?”?

Maria and Steve exchanged a long, nonplussed look, and Zola smiled in delight. “Oh, no, no, I see I have the wrong end of it. You’re not with Ivan at all, are you?”

_ What harm is there in acknowledging that? _ Maria asked with one raised eyebrow. She took the quirk of Steve’s lips as agreement and gave Zola half a nod. “We’re not,” she coolly admitted, crossing her arms. “What of it?”

“Nothing at all,” the little scientist replied, his tone almost coy. “Just an interesting…  _ coincidence _ that you’re the second set of intruders this evening, don’t you think?”

Neither she nor Steve were good enough at lying to convincingly discuss that subject without getting Bucky into even more trouble. “The Tesseract is a hot commodity,” Maria said, shrugging away from Zola’s line of conversation. This entire confrontation was already much more than she’d signed up for, and the longer they stood there, the more prickling ants of anxiety she felt crawling up the back of her shirt. “One we’re very interested in. Are you going to give it to us, or are we taking it from you?”

At this, Zola grinned outright, and Maria felt her hackles go up. Everything about this encounter had her feeling unbalanced, off-footed, and the  _ wrong _ ness of Zola’s clear glee made the room ominously claustrophobic, the air thick with treachery. “Oh, my dear, no,” he laughed, fondly patting the cube in his hand. “The Tesseract is staying right here with me.” He reached over, rapping confidently on the wall, and the reply was a shuffling in the other room and the unmistakable heavy tread of boots. “You, on the other hand, will be taken care of.”

Steve turned away from Zola and leaned close to Maria’s ear. “I count two of them,” he murmured, and she nodded in agreement. “You want to go out first, or should I?”

“You go first, high; I’ll go low,” Maria replied in kind, the two of them already moving without a backwards glance to Zola, who had just been relegated to the back burner. There was still a line of darkness from the other side of the door; Hydra was waiting, and adrenaline thumped through her veins, heady and thrilling, and then Steve flung the door open and they surged into the dark.

They didn’t make it far. The darkness was blinding after the bright lights of the closet, and Maria could clearly hear the crunch of Goon #1’s hand colliding with Steve’s face. Only the fact that she was crouching saved her from a similar fate, and only just barely: she felt the whiff of a large fist just brush the crown of her head. Maria took advantage of Goon #2’s momentary confusion and rushed him, slamming her shoulder into her best estimate of where his solar plexus would be. He took a small step back, but it was enough time for Maria to bring her leg up and kick in the direction of his midsection. 

She’d hoped to hit him in the groin, but her heel only collided with his thigh, giving him the opportunity to grab her ankle and shove her, off balance, to the floor. “Stupid,” he leered down at her, and adrenaline was already sharpening her eyes to see his ugly sneer. “That’s why we don’t have women in Hydra.”

God, they really were insufferable. “That’s what you tell yourself,” Maria said, kipping up off the floor and launching herself at him fists first, “but I’m pretty sure that it’s just because you’re all utter and complete shitbags.” She emphasized each of the last few words with hard hits aimed at knocking the wind out of her opponent’s lungs. When they were both standing upright, she was only an inch or two shorter than him; her willowy frame and long legs gave her the advantage of speed over his top-heavy, barrel-chested power. Maria used this to her advantage, dancing in and out of his reach, darting close to deal larger damage when she could. Steve and Goon #1 were rolling around in an all-out brawl behind them, punches landing hard and fast, and Maria was hoping that she could herd Goon #2 into stumbling backwards and tripping over them. He was slowing down, with extra seconds of belabored breathing in between attempted blows, each of which were getting easier to sidestep; but then, as she cornered him, his hand reached behind him for the wall and came forward holding an IKEA-grade particle board that swung straight into her jaw.

_ The fucking shelving unit, _ Maria remembered, or tried to; her language files had all been upended, letters and numbers swimming around her head like cartoon stars. Goon #2 watched her in triplicate, and seeing that smug grin three times would have been enough to make her roll her eyes if it wouldn’t hurt so goddamn much. “You don’t have much to say anymore,” he remarked, dropping the board and crossing his arms in satisfaction. “I guess all you needed was a man to put you in line--”

_ “Shut _ up,” Maria griped, stepping forward and punctuating her sigh of irritation with a right hook that swung his head a good ninety degrees. The impact reverberated up her arm and made her teeth clench in pain, so she kicked out instead, squinting to make sure that her foot was connecting squarely with the groin of Goon #2 himself and not one of his extra apparitions. He crumpled forward, one hand curling protectively around his crotch and the other reaching for the board he’d used just seconds before. Maria dropped a deliberately heavy foot on said hand while he alternated between a yelp and some sort of pathetic wheeze. “Looks like you were the one who needed to be put in line,” she leaned down to comment, meeting the seething contempt in his eyes with the coolest indifference she could muster. Her head throbbed too much to listen to whatever vitriol was knocking around his windpipe, so just before he could open his mouth and spit it out, she whacked him straight in the temple. “Asshole.”

“Nicely done.” Turning, Maria found Steve flat on the floor, chest heaving as he sucked in great gulps of air. Goon #1 was slumped a few feet from him, each eye purpling shut with bruises. She was tempted to join Steve on the carpet, filthy though it must be, but her head pulsed and she knew that if she sat down, she’d never get up. Instead, she offered him her hand and hauled him up, noting that he certainly hadn’t escaped a few bumps of his own: a welt was rapidly rising on his cheekbone, many of his knuckles were split wide open, and a trail of blood crept down the corner of his mouth. But he was all in one piece, as was she, and when he offered her a wincing apology of a smile, it was so full of concern and comfort and sheepish charm that she could have fallen into his arms and let him carry her out of the building.

_ You’re exiting through the roof,  _ Maria reminded herself, shaking off the trance of possibility.  _ Nobody’s carrying anyone anywhere. _ She directed her attention instead to the goons, eyes tracing their still forms. “These guys are both carrying guns,” she pointed out, involuntarily shuddering as she nudged the distinct bulge at Goon #1’s hip with the toe of her boot. “This fight could have ended  _ much  _ differently.”

Steve curled a warm hand around hers, quieting the sudden clanging in her ears at how close they’d been to irreversible disaster. “We’re okay,” he reassured her, “it didn’t.” But she saw her same question reflected in his eyes:  _ Why not? _ They had clearly been there to steal Hydra property, so why would a group of gunrunners refrain from using their most effective tool to stop them? And again, her mind tripped back to Arnim Zola, sitting patiently in the dark of that tiny closet, biding his time, lying in wait…  _ Why? _

“We’re running out of time,” she said at last. The throbbing in her head seemed to have spread throughout her body; she felt like one big bruise and was sure she’d look it come morning. Anxiety was tugging at the corners of Steve’s calm facade, radiating from him and thrumming in counterpoint to her dull pain. She couldn’t think, and ultimately, the  _ why _ of it all didn’t matter, as long as they got the Tesseract and got out. “Are you going back in, or am I?”

“Neither of you are.” The computer had come unplugged during the fight, so the window’s moonlight mingled with the red of the stairwell EXIT sign behind the newcomer at the door to cast him as a shadow amongst shadows. He took a step closer and Maria began to make out defining features: close-cropped hair, dark eyes disappearing under prominent brows, an aquiline nose over a heartless slash of a mouth. “They call me Crossbones. We’re going to have a little chat.”


	10. Chapter 10

Maria could tell just from his stance, just from the shifting of his feet and the slab of muscle moving under the crossed bones on his shirt, that Goons #1 and #2 were child’s play compared to this guy. _Crossbones,_ she thought derisively. _Why do men always come up with the worst nicknames?_ Not that it was important, in the grand scheme of things. She had greater priorities: namely, getting the fuck out of this place before hell well and truly broke loose.

“You’re not Hydra,” Crossbones said, as if this were a passing conversation in the park and not the preamble to a beatdown. “Or Red Room, apparently. I know you’re here for the Tesseract. I might let you leave unharmed if you give up right now and go.”

“Bullshit,” Maria scoffed. “How stupid do you think we are?”

Crossbones turned his lips down, performatively skeptical. “Well, I don’t know,” he drawled. “You’re trespassing on the private property of arms dealers while they meet with a group of thieves who are notoriously unkind themselves. Unarmed, I can see, and you seemed to think you’re going to be able to get through me. So: pretty stupid.”

 _Not as stupid as your name,_ Maria wanted to snap, but she bit her tongue. “We’re not leaving without the Tesseract,” Steve said, so firm that she could feel the steel edge of his words as they hurtled past her ear. “There’s two of us, and only one of you. Step aside.”

Here Crossbones--and Maria was getting real tired of having no other name for him--snorted. “Please,” he laughed. “There’s a reason we don’t allow women in Hydra, and that’s because they’re weak. Hydra is all about discipline, rigor, _order._ Order only comes from pain, and women can’t handle that. Incapable, unskilled, whiny, pathetic--”

 _“Jesus,”_ Maria groaned, “Can we skip to the end, please? There’s only so much misogyny my delicate feminine ears can take.”

“Can’t you shut her up?” Crossbones demanded.

Steve smiled, polite and pleasant and positively crackling with rage. “Wouldn’t even if I could,” he said cheerfully, and then he stepped up and slugged the Hydra operative directly in the face.

It had been too dark to see Steve fight Goon #1, and besides, she had been a little busy. Now, as Crossbones fought back, Maria began to see his childhood in the bend of his knees and the shuffle of his feet. He fought explosively, embodying a little kid who only expected to get a few shots in before the bully pushed him down; but Steve was no longer a scrawny public school student, and his energy seemed endless as he and Crossbones whaled mercilessly on each other. She jumped out of the way when one grappled the other in her direction, then remembered: _You’re not weak just because he thinks you are._

The next time Steve caught a fist to the jaw and staggered backwards, Maria jumped into the fray, jamming her elbow hard into every soft spot she could find. “I’m not wasting my time on you,” Crossbones growled, making to swipe her away; instead, he found himself fighting off another round of attacks as she lunged under his outstretched arm and delivered a nimble flurry of punches to his liver. “Get _off,”_ he roared, and this time the back of his hand collided with her temple and sent Maria reeling. Turning back to Steve, the Hydra goon sneered. “So you’re too weak to fight for yourself? You’re just going to give up and let her fight instead?”

Through a haze of pain, Maria saw Steve crack a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, the blood snaking down his chin painting the expression with dark amusement. “I don’t _let_ her do anything,” he snorted, cracking out the kinks in his knuckles. “And I can do this all day.”

 _Can you?_ Maria wondered, rallying herself out of the fog and following as Steve dove again for their opponent. _Your knees just stayed on the ground a second longer than before. Can you do really do this all day?_ Every time Crossbones wheeled back from one of Steve’s fists, he met Maria’s instead, but the brunt of his force was falling on Steve, and she could tell. _I know you think you’re infallible, Steve, but your hands are shaking and there’s blood in your eyes._ When Crossbones next turned away, she leapt onto his back, relying on her legs to keep herself anchored as she rained blows over his head and shoulders, thinking, _take a break, Steve, or at least a breath._ But then two hands clamped onto her thighs and she was slammed into the wall, but then there was a strangled yell, but then Steve was charging at Crossbones--and then he was dropping to the floor, and Maria saw his long eyelashes flutter shut.

 _Get up,_ she begged her legs, implored her feet: Crossbones was kicking gleefully at Steve’s legs and she wanted to bash his face in. _Get up because Steve needs you, because you both need to get out of here. Get up because Becca is counting on you, and Natasha and Bucky and Kate, maybe, if she’s not still mad. Get up because you’ve worked too damn hard in this life to get ruined by an idiot named after a fucking pirate flag._ Her muscles yowling in protest, Maria staggered to her feet and took stock. Nothing was broken, she thought, though the surge of adrenaline made it difficult to tell. She let out an audible hiss when the back of her head brushed the wall: another hit there and she’d be in serious trouble.

Crossbones seemed not to have noticed her revival. “Hey, asshole,” she croaked, painfully straightening her shoulders and clearing the sting of dust from her throat. “We’re not done.”

His malicious grin shone in the dim moonlight. “You looking for more, sweetheart?” After a couple steps towards her, he stopped and turned away, disinterested. “Nah, you’re not worth my time.” Maria took the opportunity to dart forward and punch him in the kidneys, earning her a backhanded whack that grazed her cheek. “Knock it off,” he rumbled when she shot forward again to kick at his ribcage. Despite his best efforts to sweep her away, Maria came at him again and again, playing off his refusal to fully engage and ignoring her increasingly low fuel gauge.

“Now you’re really starting to piss me off!” he finally yelled, shoving hard with two hands. This time Maria went sprawling towards the corner opposite Steve, and Crossbones loomed furiously over her as she tried to stand herself back up. Her hands groped along the junction of the meeting walls, searching, as he continued, “Why are you even _trying?_ You’re never going to win. Hydra will _never_ be destroyed, _never--”_

Her hands found what they were searching for, and Maria dug down to her toes for her last reserves of strength. “Shut the fuck up, man,” she commanded, and followed her words with a swing of the same shelf that had knocked her on her ass twenty minutes earlier. If she was being modest, it was the perfect swing, a swing that would have made all her gym teachers feel vindicated, and swing that would make Babe Ruth hang up his hat in jealousy. The board caught Crossbones square in the face, contorting his features as he fell to the floor in an unconscious heap.

Her own harsh breathing was suddenly too loud as the room fell quiet. Maria spent a moment staring at her own hands, shocked both at the violence she’d wreaked and that she’d managed to survive at all. _You could have died_ scrolled an endless loop through her thoughts, a chyron that barely managed to address the wreckage of a room in front of her. _You could have died, and yet…_ If anyone seemed like a trigger-happy maniac, it was Crossbones, but somehow a gun had never become a part of this fight, had never even been drawn. Hydra members all appeared to carry guns, as observed during Kate and Maria’s stakeouts, and she’d seen Schmidt himself lecture am underperforming surveillance team member to shoot anything that crossed the fence, even something as inconsequential as a squirrel. But these men… they’d never even reached for their holsters. And they seemed to be a squad tied directly to Arnim Zola.

 _Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,_ Maria thought. _Secure hostile, check Rogers, then you can chat up Zola._ She moved as efficiently as possible to conserve her energy while she tied up Crossbones and his goons and lugged them out of the way of the closet. By the time she was done, Steve appeared to be resurfacing from unconsciousness, a faint moan escaping his lips as he gingerly shifted his arms and legs. Ignoring the screams of protest from her knees, Maria knelt down and pressed her lips to his forehead. “I’m going to get the Tesseract,” she whispered, gently restraining his shoulders when he tried to sit up. _“Alone._ I’ll be back before you know it, so just get ready to go.”

This time, Zola’s back was to the door. “Is it done, Rumlow?” he asked without turning around from the computer screen.

“Oh, it’s done all right,” Maria replied, taking tired pleasure in the way the little scientist whipped around in his chair. If she had more energy, his rounding eyes behind those round glasses could have been the perfect bullseyes for her fist, but she was honestly too exhausted to do anything other than stick her hand out and demand, “The Tesseract, Zola. Now.”

The computer’s light illuminated the beads of sweat standing out on Zola’s forehead. Gone was the preternatural calm, replaced by discomfort and panic that radiated like toxic fumes. “I--I--don’t you want to know my cunning plan?”

“Not really,” Maria said with a shrug, sidling closer to the desk. “I think I’ve got the gist of it, and I can’t really find the energy to care.”

Zola leaned back from her, audibly swallowing. “Is--Is that so?” he asked, voice quavering. “Wouldn’t you like--that is, don’t you want to make sure you’re right?”

With a sigh, Maria halted a foot from his chair and crossed her arms. “Fine. Short version: those idiots out there are your own personal defense squad, I gather; a secret service of sorts, because Schmidt’s not in charge, you are. He and Zemo and Strucker are the ones with the street cred, but you’re the brains of the operation. Schmidt’s downstairs meeting with the Red Room, but you’re the one pulling the strings, putting all the right lines in his head so Hydra’s reputation doesn’t suffer. That’s why none of these guys shot at us: cement might be a sound dampener, but a gunshot would alert the others that something was going on up here. And, of course, they have no idea that you’re up here playing strategy games with such an important resource, do they?” Reaching to pluck the Tesseract from the desk, she bared her teeth in a feral smile and hoped it terrified him. “Can’t imagine they’ll be too thrilled to learn that you just lost it.”

“I--please,” Zola begged, grabbing at her arm, “Understand. How often does someone have a chance to get back at their high school tormentors? When I got out of school, they were exactly where they’d been when I’d left. _I_ had the money, _I_ funded the growth, and now _I’m_ the one they answer to. Can’t you see the justice?”

“I can see that you’re a piece of shit,” Maria informed him, shaking his hand off with an icy glare before slipping the hard drive into her pack. “Congratulations: you’re a major contributor to the violence in this city. Every death by one of your illegal guns is on your hands. Doesn’t seem like much of a victory to me.” The temptation to shove his pathetic face into the computer was strong, but she had what they’d come for and they’d been here too long; besides, Zola might be the chessmaster, but his pawns would turn on him in a big way when they found out what he’d done. Crossing the room, Maria turned back at the door and added, “It probably goes without saying, and you’ll probably be too busy planning your own escape, but if anyone follows us out, I will come back here and personally push those glasses so far into your face that you’ll be seeing out of your ass.”

This was a bald-faced lie, as Maria barely had the energy to pull Steve’s arm over her shoulder and hobble out the door, so they crossed the warehouse floor with more clumsy speed than caution and bolted up the stairs to the roof. Tired, dizzy, and with her vision starting to tunnel, Maria flung the backpack with the Tesseract across the alley to Dillon Electrics. “You first,” she told Steve, frowning until he stopped arguing and backed up to run. It would be worse for him and Bucky to be caught infiltrating the same building, and even though his landing wasn’t going to win points with any Olympic judges, a tight band of worry loosened from Maria’s lungs when he stood and beckoned from the other side of the chasm. Taking a deep, clear breath, Maria walked back, begged forgiveness from her aching legs, and took off.

Her landing was a tangle of limbs, and it took her a moment to realize that Steve had swept her up into his arms and was hugging her fiercely. “You did it,” he whispered over and over, solitary tears tracking down his wrecked face and getting lost in her hair.

 _“We_ did it,” she corrected, but her lips split into a reluctant smile when he shook his head and looked at her like she held his universe in her hands. “Okay, fine, _I_ did it; now can we get off this roof before we get shot?”

They clambered down the ladder and were about to steal their way across the lot to their van when a purple sports car with its headlights off pulled up at the gate. The window cranked down and Kate Bishop poked her head out. “Over here!” she hissed, furiously gesturing until they changed course, hopped the candy-striped bar, and tumbled over each other into the backseat. “I _know_ you told me not to come,” Kate began defensively as she rocketed away from the docks, “I _know;_ but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that one of those vans driving away in the middle of the night would be suspicious, and might get Bucky in trouble, and, I mean, it’s not like I could sleep, anyway, but I didn’t want to bother Clint and Nat; I mean, who _knows_ what they’re doing, and one time I walked into his apartment and they were--”

“Kate,” Maria said with weary laughter, “I love you, but--”

“I should shut up?”

_“Please.”_

 

Although Maria requested to be taken home, Kate drove straight to the Metro-General emergency room, where an exasperated night nurse rolled her eyes at their story. “A mugging,” she flatly repeated, feeling Maria’s ribs for breaks. “You want me to believe that a mugger made you look like _this?”_ Maria only grimaced innocently, and the nurse sighed. “Fine, whatever. You’re lucky your _mugger_ didn’t break anything. As it is, you’ve got a mild concussion and some definite bruising on a few ribs. I’d recommend that you stay in bed for a few days, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to listen.”

“Probably not,” Maria admitted, but she was grateful for the painkiller prescription clamped in her fist as she and Steve limped out the door. For a city that never slept, it was remarkably quiet as Kate zipped from Manhattan to Brooklyn at 3 am, and they’d soon pulled into the alley that ran alongside Maria’s building.

“I don’t live here,” Steve pointed out, somewhat belatedly, as they’d already dragged themselves up three sets of stairs.

“Duh,” Kate said with a roll of her eyes, “But you two are concussed, which means you need a babysitter, and I’m not running back and forth. Showers, then bed. No arguments.” Maria obediently shuffled into the bathroom and stripped down, momentarily recoiling as the hot water pressed upon her sore muscles before leaning into the spray. She must have stood there for too long, because soon Kate had whisked her out of the shower, efficiently stuffed her into pajamas, and propelled her to the bed for the most solid night of sleep she’d ever had.

Everything hurt when she woke up a full fifteen hours later, so she rolled away from Steve’s snoring form and again submerged into sleep. She tried again the next morning and felt human enough to shower, pop a few of the prescription painkillers Kate had thoughtfully picked up at the drugstore, and make her way down to the office to meet with Nick.

“Hill,” he said with a wry chuckle as she finished her story, “only you find a way to spice up a perfectly boring missing persons case.”

Maria shrugged and immediately regretted the action. “What can I say?” she asked with an irreverent grin. “I’m just that talented. And it was kind of fun.”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” Nick scoffed, his good eye twinkling. He leaned back in his chair and propped his fingers together. “Alright, so, you’ve got your hands on the Tesseract, but Barnes is still tied up in the Red Room. What’s your plan?”

It was pretty simple, really. The idea of giving the Red Room the Tesseract with no enduring consequences turned her stomach, but without any actual wrongdoing on their part, her options were limited. “I want to take the Tesseract to Ray’s precinct,” she explained. “The NYPD hasn’t been able to get their hands on it before, and who knows how much information on there could help shut down some of the more violent organizations.”

“That doesn’t get Barnes out of jail,” Fury pointed out.

“No,” Maria agreed, “Which is why I’m going to ask for them to give it back. It could work out!” she insisted over Nick’s wave of laughter. “It would only be temporary! They could install some tracking virus or whatever, let me hand it off to Barnes and then to the Red Room, and then once he’s out, the case is theirs. Imagine what a victory it would be to bust up all their heists, or hell, to finally find a way to nail Ivan!” She leaned forward with imploring eyes. “C’mon, Nick, you know I’m right. Tell me I didn’t get thrown into a wall for nothing.”

Nick shook his head, a slow, incredulous grin spreading across his face. “You’re something else, Maria, you know that?” he said, unambiguous pride in his voice. “I’m so proud of who you’ve become.”

“Oh _god,”_ Maria laughed, rolling away the tears trying to spring from her eyes. “Shut up before I start crying.” But she slung her arm around his waist as they walked out and as they left Ray’s precinct later with a strategy in place, she didn’t complain when he threw his arm over her aching shoulder.

It took about a week for the police to squeeze everything they needed from the Tesseract, install a host of trackers and tracers, and return it to Maria with a pile of warnings and stern looks. In turn, she passed it on to Bucky, got some lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen to help draw up some legal work that would keep Ivan away from him and his sister after the handover, and watched the exchange through her binoculars with her heart in her throat. _Watch out, Ivan,_ she thought as the Russian scrawled his name across the paper and walked off with the hard drive. _Your reign of terror is about to end._

But that was in the nebulous, though hopefully near, future. In the present, it was the Sunday before Christmas and Maria found herself at odd ends, lying with an ice pack over her still-bruised ribs and staring at the same sentence in her book for five minutes. _I miss Steve,_ she thought, and hated herself for it. He was busy reassembling the life he’d put on hold to chase down Bucky; and besides, it was ridiculous to miss someone she’d only met two months ago, someone so annoyingly stubborn that it kept her awake and so passionately noble that it made her heart hurt, someone so frustrating and impulsive and beautiful and _wonderful--_

The knock on the door was a welcome salvation from a train of thought that was rapidly running of the rails. In all likelihood, it would be Natasha, whose odd sixth sense often led her to showing up with a bottle wine exactly when Maria needed to be lifted from a funk. On the other side of the door, though, was Steve, and Maria nearly swallowed her tongue along with her prepared sarcastic remark. “Steve! I--er--Do you want to come in?”

“Hey,” he said, voice restless and rough, “Uh, no; I mean, yes, I would, a lot, but first I should say some things. I’m sorry that I didn’t call for like two weeks; I mean, I thought about you every day, honestly, but I was finding an apartment and moving and--”

“I could’ve helped,” Maria couldn’t help but point out.

This only served to further agitate him. “Yeah, but see--I mean, you’re a _person,_ with a job and--and this incredible place; I’m just a disaster. Like, I quit my job to hunt down my ex-boyfriend; and granted, he was in serious trouble, but what kind of functioning adult does that? You--You’ve got your shit together; you’re _way_ out of my league on every single level and have been since the day we met. And I couldn’t call you until I got my shit together, too, because you just--you deserve better than what I was offering--”

“Steve--”

“--So I got this job teaching art classes at the YMCA and also at the VA, and with the GI Bill I could go back to school to become an art therapist and help people work through stuff, so I’d be making a difference and changing lives and--”

_“Steve--”_

“--Anyway, the point is that I _like_ you, Maria, more than I should probably admit, and my sketchbook is full of your face--uh, that is, not in a creepy way, I just can’t stop thinking about you--I mean--I just--”

There was no helping it: Maria reached across the threshold and pulled him by the collar until his lips met hers. She could tell the moment his brain caught up to his mouth by the way his arms curled around her back and lifted until her toes just brushed the floor. It was only when she drew back for air a long minute later that she realized what a show they’d been putting on for her neighbors, including old Mrs. Busby, who eyed Steve’s back appreciatively.

“Maybe we should take this inside,” Maria suggested, too dazed to be embarrassed. “Up to my room, perhaps?”

“Absolutely,” Steve agreed, nodding politely to the neighbors before stepping into her apartment, shutting the door with a firm click, and kissing her again until her head spun. “Lead the way.”

And later, when her work phone rang in her discarded jeans, Maria sent Nick Fury to voicemail for the first time in her entire life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got this far, thanks so much for reading!! If you're a map nerd like me, you can check out the series profile for a google map I made as a reference for the locations in this series :) I have no idea what I'm working on next, but feel free to drop by my tumblr and say hi!


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